Resist or Die. posted by Richard Seymour

I guess it's just in my genes. Or it could be my hormones And if it isn't that, it's the way I was raised. Every time the hot months come round, I just get the urge to see leading cabinet members squeal like live piggies on a spit.

The Office of the Fat Controller has announced that the threat by FBU members to go on strike "irresponsible" . At the same time, airport staff are set for strike action , which they are likely to win - hence, management are desparately seeking arbitration and half-measures. The civil servants have already taken massive, solid strike action and may do so again over recent threats to jobs. And the RMT, having obtained most of the demands over which they recently struck , now threaten strike action over the loss of several hundred jobs in Network Rail. The RMT has gained a further 13,000 members since since breaking with Labour, while its membership had already grown dramatically under Bob Crowe's leadership.

But as a whole, the TUC is losing members. It is revising down its total membership by 300,000:

Research conducted by the TUC points out that, while the decline in union membership has halted in recent years, “unions have yet to experience the growth in membership that occurred in other periods of full employment and macroeconomic stability”.

The change in membership figures is related to the practice of counting “non-paying” members—for example, retired or unemployed members—in the returns unions send to the TUC.

This has the effect of making their overall membership larger than just “paying members”. Unions are required to send both sets of figures to the Certification Officer (CO), the civil servant responsible for overseeing trade union affairs.

According to unpublished data from the CO, Amicus registered only 685,000 paying members in its most recent submission to the CO. Reports claim the union is re-auditing its membership figures to strip out non-paying members.

Similarly, the fee-paying membership of the TGWU is 735,000, as compared to a total membership of 835,000.

The GMB, with a total membership of over 700,000, is also reported to be ending the practice of counting non-paying members, reducing its official membership by 104,000.

Figures for union membership have long been contentious. Unions have good reasons for wanting employers to believe they may have more members than is really the case.

And the “self reporting” involved in the returns to the TUC may well have involved some small inflation of the membership figures. Seen in this light, the TUC’s move is clearly meant as a wake-up call.

The official figures, from sources like the Labour Force Survey and the Certification Officer, show that levels of union membership have stabilised.

For example, the latest report from the CO shows a total union membership of 7.74 million (including non-TUC affiliates like the RCN and the BMA), only very slightly lower than last year’s total of 7.75 million.

But these figures mask a mixed picture of membership losses and gains. Most of the membership losses have been in areas where there have been job cuts, such as manufacturing.

In fact the job cuts in manufacturing go a long way towards explaining the decline in union membership in the 1990s.

This particularly affected the large general unions like Amicus, the GMB and the TGWU.

One response, and this is the tack being increasingly taken by Amicus, is to “grow by merger”, gobbling up smaller unions.

But the unions that have grown most spectacularly in recent years are those that have taken action in pursuit of their members’ interests.

For example, the CO’s annual report shows that the main civil service union, the PCS, has grown by some 25,000 over the past two years, and now has a total membership of 286,000.

Message to the unions: if you want to avoid extinction, get out of Labour and get militant. Resist or die.

Update: James has news that Labour have been attempting to sabotage a potential pay-deal with the FBU, thus guaranteeing strike action.