Fundamentally, trade union organisations in the global North and the global South are for those who are in a conventional, secure workplace and whose working conditions have been properly negotiated. The membership of the trade unions is in decline, whilst the informal sector grows. There is a connection between the dramatic increase in informal and precarious work and the decline in the membership of the trade unions. Globalisation is destroying the ability of workers to be an organised counter-force, so that they now have to accept as individuals the conditions they find in the sector of informal and precarious work. The organised counter-force, which always opposed the accumulation of wealth by the employers, is being weakened.
Trades unions can no longer speak on behalf of all workers.
There is a danger that, in the future, the trade unions will act only on behalf of a worker-elite. In this way, they lose their legitimacy in society as a whole. Workers in the informal and precarious sectors feel that the trade unions are not interested in them and do not represent them. Consequently, they have absolutely no protection and stand merely as individuals against the power of the system. There is a cultural, political and economic hegemony of capital in this time of globalisation.