Guide to Trade Unions

A trade union is a group of employees who join together to maintain and improve their conditions of employment. The typical activities of trade unions include providing assistance and services to their members, collectively bargaining for better pay and conditions for all workers, working to improve the quality of public services, political campaigning and industrial action.

Nearly seven million people in the UK belong to a trade union. Union members include nurses, school meals staff, hospital cleaners, professional footballers, shop assistants, teaching assistants, bus drivers, engineers and apprentices.

Most trade unions are independent of employers but have close working relationships with them.

This short guide will give you more information on:

• What Trade Unions do
• How Trade Unions work
• Legal status of Trade Unions
• Representative participation
• Reasons for joining a trade union

What Trade Unions do

Unions train and organise workplace representatives who help union members with the problems they face at work. Representatives provide support and advice and campaign for better conditions and pay.

Unions are credited with bringing about significant changes to society, including:

• a national minimum wage
• the abolition of child labour
• improved worker safety
• improving living standards by reducing the number of hours in the working week and encouraging a healthy work/life balance
• improved parental leave
• equality legislation
• better protection of migrant workers and a reduction in exploitation
• minimum holiday and sickness entitlements.

Unions have also made thousands of local agreements on issues affecting individual workplaces following consultation, negotiation and bargaining.

How Trade Unions work

Most unions are structured as a network of local branches with reps in every workplace. Union reps:

• negotiate agreements with employers on pay and conditions
• discuss major changes such as redundancy
• discuss members’ concerns with employers
• accompany members to disciplinary and grievance meetings
• help members with legal and financial problems.

Are Trade Unions legal?

In the UK trade unions have a special status in law which gives them special rights that professional associations don’t have. Employers have to work with a recognised union (however not all employers recognise a trade union and use employee representatives instead, see representative participation) to:

• negotiate pay and working conditions
• inform and consult over changes at work such as redundancies
• make sure that the health and safety of workers is protected.

Union reps have the right to consult their members and employers. This means that, as a worker, you can have your say about workplace issues.

You cannot be punished by your employer if you join – or don’t join – a trade union.

In some countries around the world, trade unions are illegal. In some places, trade union activists are intimidated, threatened and sometimes killed just for trying to get fairer conditions for workers.

Representative participation

Representative participation refers to schemes in which employee representatives meet managers on a regular basis, whether in scheduled committees, or through more ad hoc arrangements. The essential feature is that participation is not directly with individual employees and their managers but mediated through the employee representatives. Approaches include:

• Collective representation: negotiations between senior managers and employee representatives (usually but not exclusively union representatives) leading to joint regulation of pay and other conditions of employment. These can be at regular points in the case of pay, but continuous or ad hoc in the case of other matters, such as grievances.
• Partnership schemes: employee representatives and managers emphasise mutual gains and tackling issues in a spirit of co-operation, rather than through adversarial relationships. This includes a commitment to information sharing.
• Joint consultation: for discussing issues that are deemed to be of common interest or of key importance at non-union as well as unionised workplaces. Joint consultation committees (JCC) may exist in organisations to address issues that are not covered by collective bargaining and consist of management and non-management representatives. In unionised organisations, the trade unions typically provide the employee representatives, but JCCs also run with non-union employee representatives.
• Employee forums: groups of non-union or mixed groups of union/non-union employees meeting with management for consultation and information sharing.

Why join a Trade Union?

In workplaces where there are unions, unions say members benefit from the strength and security that comes from working together to tackle problems. The major benefits are:

• better working conditions such as improved health and safety or pay
• training for new skills to help you develop your career
• advice on your legal employment rights
• advice on finance and problems at work.

Trade unions may also represent their members’ interests outside the workplace. For example, trade unions may lobby the government or the European Union on policies which promote their objectives.