The missing half million
Understanding the lives, attitudes and needs of young workers is essential to designing an offer that appeals to them. This research offers important findings to be considered when designing recruitment and organising strategies. A key discovery was that due to barriers we identified, simply informing young workers about the existing trade union offer will be insufficient. There must be a substantive transformation of that offer to make it appealing and to lower the barriers that prevent young workers joining unions.
This report sets out the case for rolling out initiatives like WorkSmart so that the union movement can reach a greater number of young workers and bring them into trade unionism. It proposes a number of ways that unions can also approach their own transformation and innovation programmes. And it underlines the need to communicate differently with young workers.
Background
Despite helping millions of workers ever year, and significant union organising efforts, our membership is aging and is worryingly low in far too many parts of our economy. The future of trade unionism itself is at risk unless we add to our organising toolbox, expand our offer and modernise how unions work. We must consider how we reach those who need the protection of unions the most but are currently the least likely to benefit from membership.
This report
From 2016 to 2019, the TUC undertook a programme of research and innovation to explore how the union movement can better reach young workers. We learned a huge amount about the context of young workers’ lives, their attitudes, the barriers that stand between them and collective organising, their needs, the challenges they face at work, and what they would find appealing in a union offer.
Using this new-found insight, our response was to develop WorkSmart – a career coaching app to engage young workers where they are and bring them on a journey to collectivism at work.
This report presents our process, methodology and findings. It is intended to help the union movement grapple with the hard questions about how we transform ourselves to help meet the needs of a group of workers who far too often are unlikely to be in union membership.
We learned a huge amount about the context of young workers’ lives, their attitudes, the barriers that stand between them and collective organising, their needs, the challenges they face at work, and what they would find appealing in a union offer.
What next?
The final section of this report is a set of recommendations for unions and the TUC. Overall, this project found that unions must transform their offer to young workers if they want to recruit them at scale. Other recommendations cover how unions communicate, the union offer, and union internal working practices. We hope this report will spur unions to develop their own evidence-based recruitment and organising strategies to bring young workers into union membership.
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