The level of unionisation has plummeted from 52 percent when Thatcher took office in 1979.
Continual. wretched retreats by the main unions. left first the printworkers and then the miners isolated and eventually defeated in their defiance.
Many big bastions of man(steel, shipbuilding, mining. docks, print cars nave sace been hacked back, some to ine conne tinction.
Clerical and sales statf, and such as teachcial workers, managers, scientists and lawyers now make up 60 percent of all union members.
Industrial workers (45%) and craft workers (40%) are now less strongly unionIsed than professional staff (50%). But these newly-untablished any track record of A whole generation of younger workers has been largety ignored by the union bureaucrats: only 25 percent of workers in their 20s is a union member, compared with 40 percent of those over 40.
While more people than ever recognise the need for trade unions and a majority of voters are now opposed to the balance of forces created by the vicious battery of Tory anti-union laws, the TUC has done little or nothing to build on this sentiment and reach out to the low-paid and unemployed.
The abject failure of the GMB and TGWU to recruit staff in the expanding hotel and catering sector, for example, has enabled the employers to force wage rates even lower than they were Defeat of miners led to jobs massacre when the wages councils were abolished in 1993.
40 percent of vacancies advertised in the former wages council industries, whích employ 2.5 million workers, are now offering pay of less than £58 per ance threshold.
Even government figures show that 1.3 million fulltime workers were paid less than £2.50 an hour.