38 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
2.9 where union representatives and 3.7 where non-union representatives were
involved.
What we have here is a picture of collective representation surviving in the
organizations that epitomized the Fordist/Keynesian settlement—the public
sector and large manufacturing plants. For the rest of the private sector, and
particularly in the flourishing service sector, the norm is non-unionization
and without worker representation.
The reasons for this decline are not hard to find. There are what might be
termed the structural reasons. Central is the shift to sectors and workforces
that traditionally have not been unionized—the service sector, part-time, and
female labour. WERS 98 reflects these trends. Since 1984, the proportion of
workplaces where women comprised a low percentage (less than 25 per cent)
of employees has fallen from around a third in 1984 to a quarter in 1998.
Correspondingly, the proportion of workplaces with a high percentage of
female workers (75 per cent or more) has risen from 22 per cent in 1984 to
29 per cent in 1998. Further, the proportion of workplaces in which at least
a quarter of employees work part-time has grown from 32 per cent in 1990
to 44 per cent in 1998. Cully et al. (1999: 223–4) reckon that much of this
can be accounted for by the changing survey population. Thus, while around
two-fifths of the difference were accounted for by the growth in private service
industries, where part-time work is more common than in manufacturing,
three-fifths were accounted for by greater use of part-time work among service
sector workplaces which had joined the survey population in 1998. A further
structural issue is the failure to organize new private manufacturing and ser-
vice workplaces, set up since 1980 (Machin 2000). Another dismal statistic
for trade unions is the declining number of young people joining unions.
Comparing figures from the 1983 General Household Survey with those from
the 1999 Labour Force Survey, only 17 per cent of individuals aged 18–29 years
were union members in 1999, compared with 44 per cent in 1983 (Machin
2000).
To some extent these are structural manifestations of cultural changes in
society, epitomized in the last two decades by the advocacy of neo-liberal
economics, individualism, and an enterprise culture in Britain (Keat and
Abercrombie 1991). This has been reflected not only in the anti-union policies
of the Conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s, but in the so-called
‘Third Way’ espoused by ‘New Labour’ (Howell 2004). In spite of some ges-
tures towards the unions embodied in the Employment Relations Act, 1999,
New Labour not only failed to repeal much of the Conservative legislation,
but, according to Waddington (2003: 336), through the reversal of the opt-
out from the Social Protocol of the EU and the introduction of a National
Minimum Wage ‘supports the provision of a wider range of individual rights,
while restricting the extension of collective rights enabling trade unionists to
enforce their individual rights’. As Howell (2004: 19) neatly summarizes: