A bright new day . . . for unions?

There was a brilliant article in The Economist last month, which I meant to link to earlier . . . except that I lost track of that issue of the magazine. Until now. It's a brief look at Sara Horowitz's attempt to make the union movement relevant to freelance workers. This is something I've been arguing in favour of for years (and not just because my employment pattern closely resembled freelancing).

If unions fail to innovate to meet the needs of workers in non-traditional industries, they're doomed to shrink until they only represent government employees. The key is to represent the individual worker not the job: make union benefits portable from job to job and you'll have a major drawing card for employees who find it too expensive to purchase benefits individually or who work for employers who provide too skimpy a set of benefits.

Of course, that requires a major re-alignment of existing unions from their long-standing belief that individuals really don't matter, only the jobs themselves matter. I'm afraid it'll be a long time before that shift can happen.