The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) will publish its Trade union statistics 2018 statistical bulletin on the 30th May.

In anticipation of this we have estimated the changes in trade union membership in the United Kingdom (UK) using data from the 2017 and 2018 October – December Labour Force Survey(LFS) produced by the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

1 Trade Union Membership

Between 2017 and 2018 the total trade union membership, who are employees, increased  by 106,000, an increase of 1.7 per cent.

There has been a very small decrease in male trade union membership of 0.8 per cent, and a more substantial increase in female trade union membership of 3.8 per cent, or 128,000 – see Fig 1.

Fig 1: Female and Male Trade Union Membership 2017-18 Source ONS

2 Trade Union Density 

In this blog Trade Union density refers to the ratio of the number of employees who are members of trade unions to the total number of employees in the UK. Some academics use trade union density rates as a proxy for trade union power. The greater the trade union density the more powerful, in collective bargaining terms a trade union is assumed to be.

Between 2017 and 2018 male trade union density declined by 0.4 from 20.8 per cent to 20.4 per cent, a decrease of 2.1per cent.

Conversely female trade union density increased from 25.2 per cent to 25.8 an increase of 2.4 per cent – see Fig 2.

The total TU density increased by 0.1 per cent from 23.0 to 23.1 per cent.

Fig 2: Female and Male Trade Union Density 2017-18 Source ONS

3 Trade Union Composition

The composition of male trade union employees between 2017 and 2018 decreased by 1.1 from 45.7 to 44.6 per cent, a decrease of 2.4 per cent – see Figure 3. It is obvious that the female composition increased by 1.1 from 54.3 to 55.4 an increase of 2 per cent.

Fig 3: Female and Male Trade Union Composition 2017-18 Source ONS. 

4 Employment

Between 2017 and 2018 male employees increased by 192,000 from 13.7m to 13.9m an increase of 1.4 per cent. For female employees the increase in employment was slightly less at 186,000 from 13.7m to 13.9m an increase of 1.4 percent – see Figure 4.

Total employee employment increased by 378,000, an increase of 1.4 per cent.

Fig 4: Female and Male Employment ‘000 2017-18 Source ONS

5 Employee Composition

In the period between 2017 and 2018 the male and female composition of the employee workforce  remained stable at  50.5 per cent and 49.5 per cent  – see Figure 5.

Fig 5: Female and Male Employment Composition 2017-18 Source ONS 

Technical Note

The BEIS figures may differ slight from the figures used in this blog. There are three reasons for this. The first is rounding errors, and the second is that we are using a more aggregated data set than that used by BEIS. Third is the weight used by BEIS used in its calculations. Unfortunately, BEIS does not report the weighting used in its bulletin so it is possible that we are using a different weighting to BEIS. However, the differences are well within normal margins of statistical error.