NEW data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows a further significant fall in the number of Australians choosing to join trade unions.

Just 17% of Australian employees were members of a trade union in August 2013, down from 18.3% in 2010. This maintains the consistent long term trend away from trade union membership, down from highs of over 40% less than 25 years ago:

In raw numbers there are now fewer trade union members (1.75 million), than there were in August 2010 (1.79 million), despite the employed labour force having grown by 4.9% or 483,500 persons across the same period.

The fall in union membership is particularly stark in the private sector, with just 12%, or fewer than 1 in 8 Australians working in private enterprise now joining a trade union.

Trade unionism is also becoming increasingly the domain of older employees with the distribution of membership concentrated in employees over 45:

Consistent with the increasing age of union members, is their time in the union. 67.5% of union members have been members for 5 years or more.

The Resource Industry

Looking at the industry level, the density or concentration of union membership in the mining industry (including the hydrocarbons and allied sectors) sits mid-table at 16%, slightly below the all industries average, inclusive of both the public and private sectors.

The ABS further breaks the mining industry level down into sub categories, which with some cautions regarding the reliability of the lower data points, indicate:

• Coal mining has the highest levels of unionisation, at 39.9% of employees. This is a significant fall from the preceding year’s data which showed 44.1% of coal industry employees as union members.
• Unionisation in all other sections of the industry is significantly lower including Oil and gas extraction (13.9%), Metal ore mining (8.3%), and Exploration and mining support services (11.2%).
• Construction records an overall figure of 15.9%, but when examined at the sub industry level includes Heavy construction and Civil engineering at 25.0%.

To read the full report from the ABS, click here.