TUC Equality Audit 2024
The TUC Equality Audit 2024 sets out TUC affiliate unions’ activity in the area of collective bargaining on equalities issues in the four years leading up to the end of 2023. It follows similar audits covering equality bargaining published in 2003, 2005, 2009, 2012, 2016 and 2020/21. 1
The audit was carried out by the Labour Research Department (LRD) through an online questionnaire sent to all TUC affiliates in late September 2023, with responses requested by late December 2023.
The response rate was considerably higher than in 2020, with 43 of the TUC’s 48 affiliated unions replying, or 90 per cent. This compares with 75 per cent four years earlier and represents the highest ever response rate for the collective bargaining TUC Equality Audits.
As the five unions that didn’t respond were smaller affiliates (all with fewer than 6,000 members), the proportion of total TUC membership represented in the survey was very high, at 99.7 per cent. This compares with 97.9 per cent in 2020.
The affiliates that responded are listed in Appendix A and more information on TUC affiliated unions including full names and sectors can be found on the TUC website. In addition to completing the questionnaire, unions were asked to supply examples of:
particularly important guidance they had produced for negotiators in the last four years on the bargaining topics covered by the audit.
particularly important agreements or policies on these topics they had achieved with employers in the last four years.
The figures throughout the report can only give a broad indication as the categories used in the questions have some overlap and unions will categorise training, guidance and wins differently. In some cases, analysis has also been carried out according to union size. The aim of this approach is to acknowledge that different-sized unions have different capacities to collectively bargain, produce guidance and training, and focus on different areas.
- 1 The last one covered the period 2016-2020 but was not published until 2021 because of the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
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