BRUSSELS/PARIS, Sept 18 (Reuters) - The future of European
trade unions is under 30, has never worked an assembly line and
is just as likely to wear high heels as work boots.
The experience of Angelina Gill, for example, couldn't be
further from the grime of the furnace and the bustle of the
factory floor. And yet she is exactly the kind of member unions
need to survive in the 21st century.
The bubbly 29-year-old is a French civil engineer working
for a Brussels-based company that employs less than 10 people.
She has a masters' degree in engineering, is fluent in three
languages and until recently never dreamed of joining a union.
"I thought unions were just here to strike. That's the idea
I had. I never thought they could help you," she said.
For much of the past 50 years unions have found most of
their primarily male, working-class members in heavy industry
and the public sector. They flourished in factories or mines
with masses of workers whose economic interests were closely
aligned, exerting leverage through collective bargaining.
But as the factories closed, economies became increasingly
service-oriented and so did most employees. With specialised
skills and a more individual sense of their careers, office
workers had far less interest in the collective.
The result has contributed to a slow decline for organised
labour in many countries, highlighted by shrinking membership
and some embarrassing displays of weakness, most recently in the
failure to organise a credible resistance to layoffs in the
2009-10 economic crisis.
In France, union membership has fallen from almost 20
percent in 1980 to just under 8 percent in 2008. In Germany, it
has fallen from 35 percent to just under 20 percent in the same
period, according to data from the OECD.
WAKE-UP CALL
But some unions are fighting back, taking to the Web to
offer more individualised services and reaching out to highly
educated employees in small companies and to temporary and
independent workers who traditionally have been ignored.
"I think the awareness is very big within our members, and I
think the process has started and yes, I think it will
accelerate," said Bernadette Segol, General Secretary of the
European Trade Union Confederation.
Since Gill joined her soil analysis firm two years ago, her
union has helped her submit tax forms and claim holidays to
which she did not know she was entitled.
Over the past few months, Gill's representative at the
liberal CGSLB union, the smallest of three unions in Belgium,
has guided her through complex wage negotiations as she prepares
to take on a new job, helping her secure a higher salary.
"I have a question, I ask it, I get an answer. What better
can there be? They've never failed me," she said, likening the
service to that of a lawyer but at a far lower cost.
According to European Commission data, two-thirds of private
sector workers in the European Union are now employed by
companies that have fewer than 250 staff and annual sales of
under 50 million euros. Companies with fewer than 10 workers
provide a third of all private sector jobs.
Richard Hyman, professor of industrial relations at the
London School of Economics, says unions are stepping up efforts
to appeal to non-traditional members.
"(Unions) have got to find ways of using what they've got
more smartly and I think in a lot of unions people are conscious
of that and are trying to look at ways in which they can do
this," he said.
NEW FRENCH LEGISLATION
In France, which has one of the lowest percentages of
unionised workers of any OECD nation, unions had little
incentive to find new members due to a law dating back to 1948.
Under the law, only five unions were allowed to represent
workers in collective agreements, and those five had
"irrevocable" rights to representation, meaning that workers had
no choice about who represented them. Unions were supported
financially by the state and management; membership dues only
accounted for a small fraction of their income.
That changed in 2008 with a law that said unions needed to
win the votes of at least 10 percent of a firm's workers to be
able to represent them.
The CFTC, a Christian group which was one of those that had
"irrevocable" rights, resisted the reforms at first, arguing the
system was open to manipulation by management. But like their
counterparts, they have since accepted the inevitable and turned
their energies to recruitment.
Because the reform also included a clause allowing firms
with fewer than 11 employees to vote for external union
representation for the first time starting in November, there is
plenty of scope for expansion.
Roughly two-thirds of people work in SMEs in France, and
some 3 million workers in the total worker population of 16.5
million work in very small firms.
"We had practically no members in this type of company,"
said Philippe Louis, head of the CFTC union, which has about
140,000 members and is mostly active in the private sector.
The appeals CFTC has mounted online are narrowly focused -
executive assistants with more than two years' seniority in a
company are one target demographic. Recruiters seek out young
members outside offices and concert halls.
"These people have a right to the same advantages as the
employees of big companies, but as it is now they are denied
privileges like (subsidised) lunch checks, participation in
works councils and so on."
STAUNCHING THE FLOW
Union membership in Denmark, Sweden and Finland remains high
- around 70 percent - partly because unemployment and other
social benefits are paid out through unions. Free of the stigma
that can be associated with organised labour, members are also
eligible for a range of services not available to non-members,
from representation in job interviews to free cooking classes.
But elsewhere in Europe, membership is declining. In
Germany, unions are trying to trying to stem departures by
recruiting non-traditional members like external contractors and
temporary staff.
The Netherlands and Austria has had success by offering
services to the self-employed - union membership in Austria has
stabilised at around 18 percent in the last few years from
around 50 percent in the mid-seventies. In the Netherlands it
declined from 40 percent at the start of 1960 to stabilise at 18
percent.
Belgian unions, aiming to recruit from the third of Belgian
workers employed by companies with fewer than 10 staff, say
people have become more anxious to obtain the protection of
union membership since the start of the financial crisis.
"The crisis has made people more worried about getting into
conflicts at work," Didier Seghin, a spokesman for Belgium's
CGSLB liberal union.
Many European unions are evolving into a type of advisory
service that moves with workers from job to job to help them
negotiate the best contract and get help with tax returns.
In Belgium, for example, all university graduates are
obliged by the government to sign on as job seekers once they
leave school, and this can be done through a union, giving
people access to advice even before they start their first job.
"When you just get out of university, you have no clue of
how the working sphere works. You have no clue what you can ask
as a salary," said civil engineer Gill.
"If I'd have known, I think I would have joined the union
before my first job, because when you have to negotiate your
first salary you are just lost, and of course that's the moment
when they try to get the most out of you."
(Additional reporting by Feliciano Tisera in Madrid, Gilbert
Kreijger in Amsterdam, Angelika Gruber in Vienna; Editing by
Sonya Hepinstall)