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Introduction
The report of the ILO's Global Commission on the Future of Work, titled Work for a brighter future (ILO, 2019), lists various challenges which, if leftunattended, threaten the well-being, job prospects and security of entire populations, and thus the social and economic foundations for growth, freedom and democracy. The social and regional divide connected with digitalization; the skill deficits and mismatches associated with artificial intelligence, automation and robotics; the return to 19th-century employment relations in gig-work and crowdworking; and the disruptive effects of climate change and population shifts call more than ever for the sort of solidarity that trade unions stand for. Recently, the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has come forward with a similar appeal. In his introduction to the 2019 Employment Outlook, Secretary-General Angel Gurría writes that "many people and communities have been leftbehind by globalisation and a digital divide persists in access to new technologies - resulting in inequalities along age, gender, and socio-economic lines", and "greater focus must also be placed on collective bargaining and social dialogue, both of which can complement government efforts to make labour markets more adaptable, secure and inclusive (OECD, 2019, pp. 1-2). The question is: can unions do it? Can they break the trend of declining unionization and bargaining coverage of recent decades in the analogue world, strengthen their representative legitimacy, and be innovative in engaging with workers in the digital economy?
That unions need to revitalize themselves and reach out beyond their present constituency in order to stay relevant is beyond doubt. In both industrialized and developing countries, trade unions struggle to expand beyond the narrowing minority of workers in declining industries, large firms and the public sector. In the industrialized countries union membership is ageing; in low-income and developing countries trade unions have contracted with the decline in formal employment. Lacking or weak representation of young people, of workers with temporary employment contracts, of women in some countries, and of freelance and own-account workers, whether correctly or falsely classified like those in the gig economy, weakens the future growth of trade unions, narrows their agenda and erodes their legitimacy in collective bargaining and social dialogue.
In the first part of this article, I briefly delineate the trends in union membership across...