The labour union movement is more than 100 years old.  At its outset it sought to improve the lot of employees relative to the rights automatically accorded to the owners of businesses.

The power of the unions coincided with a period of rapid industrial transition.  Workers were required to have a certain degree of skill.  As machines became more complex to use, and more dangerous for the unskilled, it was harder for business owners simply to fire their staff.  Self organisation gave employees an equal say in the business.

Over the last 50 years the structure and organisation of businesses has changed.  Companies are now widely owned and answerable to shareholders and various independent control bodies, in addition to their staff.  The increasing complexity of products, distribution and marketing has also resulted in a wider distribution of labour.  Unions now represent “blue collar” workers, while managers and owners are lumped together as “white collar” workers.  Yet even that is an over-simplification.

Pure manufacturing is no longer the core part of a large company; their brand is.  The management of that brand, the creation of innovative new products and managing their distribution and uptake into markets is the subject of daily operations.  This is sophisticated work and the level of skill in the average office has risen rapidly.  Multiple degrees and MBAs are ever more common.  The actual manufacturing of the product is now akin to the type of manual labour seen on a large farm in the 18th century.

Unions used to represent virtually everyone at a company who wasn’t a shareholder.  Now they represent an ever-shrinking component of the business supply chain; and that, the least skilled.  It is not that Unions have deliberately chosen the least skilled members, but it is that the mindset inherent in Unions has not changed since they were first started.  They have always represented people who – as they see it – do the actual work of manufacturing the product.  Even 50 years ago that person was someone on a factory floor.  

Nowadays a shoe-designer may not get anywhere near a shoe.  They work in an office on a team with people who discuss fashion trends around the world, fabric designers and marketing teams who discuss everything about the way in which the product will be seen.  Then they go back to a computer and design the product in tandem with others using sophisticated algorithmic software.  None of these people is unionised.  Most of them will be on short-term contracts working on this project to get the product to market.  The purchasing department who are responsible for getting the product made will be considering bids from factories around the world who wish to produce the item for them.  A company manufacturing millions of shoes may not have that many direct employees.

In other words, Unions are representing people further and further away from the design process and, therefore, with less and less power over the brand they work for.  If an entire factory hates the conditions of their work and decides to go on strike then that factory will suffer.  A well-organised company simply moves the manufacturing order to another factory as quickly as it takes to send the design specifications by email.

The rise of just-in-time manufacturing means that companies have set up infrastructure to ensure that, if there is a problem, then they can still get the work done somewhere else with only a limited impact on their timelines.

The result, though, is that the nature of power in the workplace is changing.  Unskilled workers may be able to shut down a plant – but all they achieve is destroying their own jobs.  

Talent has always been critical to businesses.  Talent used to be essential on the factory and so, when Unions represented that talent, they had power.  Now talent is footloose and selling itself to the highest bidder.  Companies use farms of coders to do the slogging of getting basic algorithms to work around the overall design created for them by a highly talented programmer working for them only on that project.  In all patterns of work talented people are unrepresented and, frequently, not gaining as much as they should from their gifts and hard work.

The future of talent and work is already starting to take shape.  Social networking software is gradually coalescing around specific interests.  Soon talented professionals will start comparing notes about how they are treated, what payment standards should be.

And, next time, when a company tries to play one talented youngster off against another, they’ll be talking to each other and will negotiate from strength.

Pity the Unions, they represent only the past.