I was a trade union member all my working life and now I retain "Retired Member" status. For seventeen years I was actively involved in representing my branch and region including being a Branch Secretary (voluntary evening, weekend and holiday duties). Reflecting on what trade unions have achieved since the mid-19th century, it seems to me that they did little to change the balance between the overall economic returns to labour and capital until the 1980s. In cyclical economic shifts from "boom" to "bust", and low to high unemployment, in the up-cycle TUs managed to negotiate real economic gains for workers and, to a certain extent, managed to hang on to some of these in the down-cycle. Overall, however, I don't believe that they achieved a fundamental change in the distribution of wealth - except between different occupational groups within the workforce (including union/non-union).
Of far more importance, I believe, were the achievements in areas of working conditions and health and safety at work. (People who make jokes about "Elf & Safety gorn mad"
should take a look at death and injury rates in Turkish industry where H&S rules do not apply. It used to like in the UK as well. Alongside this, there have been major achievements in the protection of the rights of individual workers in relation to harassment and bullying, unfair dismissal, arbitrary discipline, and so on.
The situation changed in the 1980s. Urged on by the Thatcher Government, bosses embarked on what people involved in Industrial Relations described as the "Employers' Offensive". This was a concerted and prolonged campaign to strip away all the rights and protections that TUs had established over a couple of generations. This didn't seem to matter much to many people as long as the economy was booming; employees were getting on OK in conditions of high employment; perhaps the unions were outdated. Following the 2008 global crisis of financial capital the prolonged economic depression that followed showed the vital need for trade unions. Agreed working conditions and hours have been swept away, entitlements have ripped up, huge swathes of workers have been sacked with little consideration, and individual victimization is commonplace. When we stand back and take a wider view, what we can see over the last three decades is a massive shift of wealth from labour to capital - and the agents of capital, those senior executives whose salaries and bonuses are incomprehensible to most of us (perhaps even to them). In retrospect, maintaining the economic balance between returns to labour and to capital - which I had rather dismissed in the opening paragraph - now seems no small achievement.
Rebuilding trade unions from here is not going to be easy - but then building them in the first place wasn't. I share JT's wish for a higher profile, pro-active, recruitment campaign; not only by individual unions but by the labour movement in general. For my children's and grandchildren's sake - and for yours - I hope the task is achieved.