Union membership up for third year running

As this issue of Fact Service went to press the Office of National Statistics (ONS) released the annual figures for union membership in the UK. These will be examined in full in next week’s issue, but for now we can report that the number of union members in the UK in 2019 rose 91,000 to 6.44 million – the third year of increases after the fall to a low of 6.23 million in 2016. This means the proportion of UK employees who were union members in 2019 was 23.5%.

According to the ONS the rise in membership – which was significantly higher in the public sector than the private one – was driven by the increase in female members, up 170,000 on the year to 3.69 million in 2019. This was the highest number of women who were trade union members since the surveys began in 1995.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/trade-union-statistics-2019