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Union membership falling and is lowest in WA, statistics show

720 ABC Perth
Fewer people are joining unions

Declining union membership is being blamed on labour market changes.

Samia O'Keefe: ABC News

Union membership is declining across Australia and is the lowest in Western Australia, new figures have revealed.

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed just 13.7 per cent of WA workers belong to a union, compared to a national average of around 17 per cent.

Those figures have declined significantly over the past two decades, with 43 per cent of Australian workers belonging to a union in 1992.

In WA, 160,600 people were union members last year - 3,300 less than the previous year.

UnionsWA state secretary Meredith Hammett has put the falling membership down to a combination of labour market changes and favourable economic conditions.

"Part of what we've experienced is a really significant change in the way the labour market is made up," she told 720 ABC Perth.

"For example, in WA there's a very high level of turnover around jobs."

Ms Hammett said other factors included the increasing use of temporary workers, casual workers, and temporary migrant labour, as well as the decline of the manufacturing industry and the increasing prevalence of individual contracts.

"I think what we're seeing in WA at the moment is very good economic times," she said.

"People might be able to negotiate better than what they might have got through an award, but what we see is that those negotiations are happening in an environment where unions are still providing a very important role in setting what are minimum community standards."

An example of this, she said, was yesterday's minimum wage increase announced by the Fair Work Commission.

"The national wage case will see flow on to hundreds of thousands of people, whether they are in the union or not," she said.

Stereotypes of thuggery not helping

Master Builder's Association construction director Kim Richardson said the declining union membership could be attributed to a changing workforce and images of union thuggery.

"The union movement over the last 25 years has been struggling to come to terms with changes within the national and state workforce," he said.

"You have a major shift in the mines where they've moved from direct employer-employee relationships, no intervening third party.

"You've also had a major structural shift to subcontractors in the workforce with at least a million workers in the national workforce. They're not union members, they're not employees."

Mr Richardson said the union movement had an image problem, exemplified by former Health Services union leader Craig Thomson who was jailed for stealing union funds.

"Certainly the unions do have a constructive role to play within the the workforce .. [but] the point is there are some recalcitrant unions .. who really are a damaging effect in connection with the market and the brand of the union movement."

But Ms Hammett said such stereotypes were far removed from reality.

"In Western Australia, the majority of union members are women, they're most likely to be university educated, probably working in health, social assistance, those kinds of professions," she said.

"So whilst there is a focus on those stereotypes, I think it's really important that people understand that's not the reality."

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