8 - The Future for Australian Unions

Summary

Declining union density has potentially wide implications for society and for the study of industrial relations. Continuing reductions in union density might be expected to lead, unless other forces intervene, to widening inequality and reduced ‘voice’ for employees in their working lives. As Barbash (1985) has pointed out, it is unclear whether the benign aspects of human resource management would continue in the absence of organised labour's countervailing power. Moreover, the traditional academic discipline of industrial relations is founded, ultimately, upon the study of the interactions between employers and collectively organised employees: the decline in union density in Britain has been claimed to be leading to the ‘end of institutional industrial relations’ (Purcell 1993), fundamentally affecting the way labour markets are studied. This book has therefore presented a framework for analysing the reasons for union membership and non-membership, and has examined the reasons for union decline.

In the preceding chapters, union membership in Australia has been examined within a ‘change-response’ framework. This model was used because it focused on the way in which union membership is determined by changes in the environment or in the strategies of major participants in the industrial relations system, and by the way in which other participants respond to those changes.