Australian Left Review
Article Title
Some Features of the Trade Unions
Abstract
1. Decline in Union Membership
THE PERCENTAGE that members of trade unions are of the total number of wage and salary earners is shown in Table 1 for the period from 1946 to 1969. The feature it shows is that from 1956, although the total number of trade unionists had increased by 81%, their percentage of the total number of wage and salary earners had fallen by 11% from 61% to 50%. This is lower than the 51% of 1921. Or putting it another way, if the 61% of 1956 had have been maintained, the trade union movement in 1969 would have had 355,580 more members.
This paper has been withdrawn.