Virus proves boon for UK unions but challenges remain

LONDON: Britain's trade unions have seen a resurgence during the coronavirus outbreak as more people worry about layoffs, working conditions and the knock-on effects of lockdown.

But their growing strength could yet be weakened by a wave of job cuts sweeping the country, which is predicted to worsen in the coming months.

Unions have seen an increase in membership during the health crisis, despite the tens of thousands of redundancies already announced.

New members have especially come from those hardest hit by the outbreak, such as aviation, leisure and hospitality.

Unite, Britain's biggest union, which has 1.4 million members, has been prominent in speaking out about job cuts.

It called British Airways announcement in April that it will cut 12,000 jobs -- a quarter of its workforce -- as a "betrayal" of workers.

BALPA, the British pilots' union, has agreed to a 20 percent pay cut to save 260 of its members' jobs that it said Irish airline Ryanair wanted to axe.

Even if union power is weakened compared to their heyday in the 1970s, they still play a key role -- even if they are unable to stop job losses.

"Many workers have been furloughed and/or are facing job loss due to the pandemic, so they have turned to trade unions for independent advice and support," Sally Wright, from the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick, told AFP.

'Significant wins'

The pandemic has prompted concerns from employees about working conditions, as companies introduce a raft of new health measures and rules that are not always easy to comply with in workplaces like factories and warehouses.

In the public sector, the union Unison registered nearly 100,000 new members in the first five months of the year, most of them in May.

"During the pandemic, thousands of people working in the NHS (National Health Service), social care, schools, police forces and local government have been joining," said Unison's Liz Snape.

Carl Roper, from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) umbrella body, said the increasing numbers of workers seeing the relevance of unions pointed to "a moment of revitalisation" for them.

He said some of the TUC's "significant wins" in recent months in areas of national policy, such as with government's job retention scheme, and in workplace safety, had contributed to their newfound popularity.

'Difficult climate'

According to the Office for National Statistics, some 6.44 million people were union members in 2019, buoyed by increasing numbers of women in work and health sector jobs.

But it is still a far cry from the late 1970s when there were more than 13 million union members.

A gradual decline was seen in the 1980s and 1990s, which were marked by rising unemployment and increasing privatisation, continuing through the 2008 financial crisis.

Conservative party prime minister Margaret Thatcher was a key figure in curbing union power, with her free-market agenda -- and introduction of changes in the law to make strikes more difficult.

Now, the challenge is to maintain growing numbers amid large-scale job cuts, which could get even worse as emergency government support schemes are withdrawn later this year.

"We have had a really good three years but the rest of this year is going to be a very difficult climate," said Roper.

"If there are mass redundancies across the economy, that's going to be a lot of pressure on trade unions' memberships. People leave the job, they leave the union."

Another pitfall is the difficulty in appealing to independent workers in the so-called gig economy, many of them young and first to be affected by any economic upheaval.

Also, the switch to working from home -- initially seen as temporary during lockdown but which could become the norm -- presents its own challenges in terms of communication and recruitment.

"It requires new ways of working, just as many of other workers have been required to do during the pandemic," said Wright.