Forum. “Ineffective, unrealistic, ideological, politicized, too divided, away from employees,” over the polls, the union movement is still much maligned. Add the reports, the provisions of the laws or the insistent rhetoric about the need to raise the skills of “those unionists who don’t understand the strategic issues and economic” companies.
Sprinkle a hint of subliminal message to young employees (executives in particular) on the relative (but real, according to the Observatory of discrimination and repression of trade union) incompatibility between career development and commitment of staff representative… You will have the recipe for a weakening of concern of the existence of trade unions that, even if it seems counter-intuitive, bodes a bleak future for the world of business.
The persistence of a low rate of unionization (90% of the employees are not unionized) and the difficult renewal of activists (between 1983 and 2013, the share of over 50 years has increased by 18 points among union members, compared to 7 points among the employees) are the symptoms of this crisis. Practices, the operations, the postures (as the dispute-sterile accompaniment docile), but also the institutionalization of trade unions, through the management of joint bodies and financial support of organizations, have undermined their legitimacy, which is conceived from the construction of a power relationship based on a staff members and activists that can be mobilized in the company.
Transformation of the productive fabric
Certainly, disaffection towards unions is part of a more general context of weakening of the major “institutions of engagement” such as political parties. But in the case of trade unions, the classical model of activist commitment has been shaken by the transformation of the productive fabric and the salaried….
