An evolutionary dynamic of trade union systems

In recent years, parallel trends of organizational restructuring have become manifest among trade unions. Sharing similar experiences of stagnant membership and falling density rates, coupled with structural shifts in employment from industry to services and a growing pressure to attend to the needs of more heterogeneous constituencies under increasingly decentralized labor-management relations, trade unions must adapt their internal operation and external representation. In particular, unions seem to suffer from the same inverse fluctuation of revenue and client needs as social security systems, as the economics of union organizing require that most members, most of the time, do not call upon the union's services except for the collective protection it offers. In many countries, trade unions are now in a process of regrouping in which sectoral boundaries are becoming increasingly unimportant. Drawing on the case histories of union development in Germany and the Netherlands, the paper shows that current changes in the organizational landscape of trade unions are not based on political strategies of interest representation, grounded in visions of class unity or industrial governance, but are driven by an evolutionary dynamic of unions as service organizations which must respond to general principles of adaptive-economic rationality.