Mapped data in London. Thomas Corrie/Flickr. CC (by-sa)
“Will you be happy when the last union office turns its lights off? Is that what success looks like?” This is a challenge Mike Clancy, general secretary of Prospect, sometimes lays down to employers and HR professionals, evoking an image that only the most hard-bitten anti-union ideologue would endorse. When he said it at the recent Unions 21 conference, hot on the heels of a graph charting 40 years of declining membership, it had the ring of a warning to the movement. If we carry on like this, our extinction is a real probability. Adapt or die.
If “the species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt to the changing environment in which it finds itself”, the evidence suggests that trade unions are not very good at adaptation. It’s time we took lessons from the modern masters of the art.
