Presentation to participants in TUC's Leading Change programme.

Covering: union membership; bargaining coverage; organizational and financial resources; influence on wages, fringe benefits and workplace performance;  employees' and employers' perceptions of unions.

Using data from: the Workplace Employment Relations Survey, the Certification Officer, the Labour Force Survey and the British Social Attitudes Survey.

This paper examines how employees' experiences of, and attitudes towards, work have changed over the last quarter of a century. It assesses the extent to which any developments relate to the economic cycle and to trends in the composition of the British workforce. Many of the findings are broadly positive, particularly when compared with a picture of deterioration in the late 1980s and 1990s. The onset of a major recession in the late 2000s might have been expected to herald a fundamental shift in employees' attitudes to paid work and their working environment.