But if those rates of expansion continued, the share of employees on zero-hours contracts would reach around 7% within a decade. Trends in temporary and part-time work have been less striking, but have gone in the same direction. Between 1997 and 2008, temporary work declined as a share of employment. But since 2008 it has increased. There are currently around 200,000 more temporary workers than before the financial crisis. Prior to the crisis, around 25% of those in employment worked part-time. Since the crisis, that share has increased to around 26%, or around 8 ½ million workers. If we took together self-employment, part-time and temporary working and zero-hours contracts, their share 9  of the workforce has probably risen to around 43%, or around 13 ½ million workers. The corresponding figures back in 2000 would have been around 39% of the workforce, or around 10 ½ million workers. This is not a majority, but it is a significant and rising minority of workers. 8 9  For example, Blanchflower and Machin (2017). There needs to be caution when simply summing these categories as some of them probably overlap, generating double-counting. 6  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  6  These trends in self-employment, temporary and part-time employment are based on survey data. Those broad trends are corroborated if we look at data on job vacancies rather than employment.
That membership rate has steadily declined over time, extending a broad trend apparent since at least the mid-1970s. In 2016, membership of trade unions stood at 23% (Chart 5). Today, around 6 million employees are members of trade unions, less than half the peak of around 13 million in the late-1970s. That fall in union membership rates has been broadly based. It has applied to both males and females, although the fall in membership has been greater among males with rates falling from 35% in 1995 to 21% today. It has occurred in both the public and private sectors, although public sector employees remain around four times more likely to be union members. And it has been true across all age groups, although rates of union membership tend to be lowest among younger cohorts, with rates among the 16-24 age cohort 8% compared with 30% for those aged 50 and over. 5  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  5  The fact that unionisation rates have been falling within each age cohort over time, and are lowest among the young, suggests the downward trend in rates of unionisation may still have some distance to travel. For example, if unionisation rates were to continue to decline at the same average rate as over the past decade, then they are likely to fall to around 10% of employees, or 3 million people, within a generation. A more recent labour market trend is the increased importance of self-employment.