Trade Union Membership on the decline

Recent industry trends show that Trade Union membership is on a downward slide in Ghana.

CITY & BUSINESS GUIDE gathered that out of the approximately one million workforce in Ghana, only about half belong to the Trade Union Congress (TUC), the umbrella body of trade unions in Ghana.

This worrying trend has bedevilled the TUC for a while, and it is fighting frantically to reverse the decline. “Less and less people are being represented. Less and less people are getting their interests protected by unions”, Dr. Yaw Baah, Deputy Secretary General of the TUC told said in an exclusive interview.

In 2009, the TUC, in a labour market journal, ‘The Labour Market in Ghana’, articulated the downward spiral of the membership size of the various trade unions in Ghana, stating that only 37.5 percent of the working age population who had a job in 2009had trade unions at their workplaces. Labour experts told CITY & BUSINESS GUIDE that the situation could be even bleaker now.

According to Dr. Baah, the low rate of trade union patronage could be attributed to a range of factors; including the fact that the Ghanaian formal sector might not be expanding commensurately to the rapidly expanding economy.

This situation is contrary to the widely held perception that the government is facilitating the formalization of the economy. Already 90 percent of the working population is informal.

Another reason for the low patronage of organized labour, according to Dr. Baah, was the stigmatization of the whole concept of organized labour in the country. He told CITY&BUSINESS GUIDE that some people still held the misconception that organized labour was meant for people who couldn’t stand on their own feet.

Critics contend that sometimes, employers also deliberately frustrated efforts of their workers to form organized labour groups, fearing the strength of their demands in a unified structure. Meanwhile, Ghana’s labour laws clearly require that workers who lose their jobs as a result of re-organisation or closure of an enterprise should be compensated. This arrangement has been part of Ghana’s unwritten social policy to ensure that workers who lost their jobs were cushioned from social and economic shocks that usually come with job losses. However, employers have often downplayed this provision.

In the Health Sector Workers’ Union (HSWU) for instance, the massive capital flight dogging the health sector has been blamed for robbing the sector of its membership. “As they move away we are losing members”, Abu Kuntulo, HSWU general secretary, told the paper.

Data shows that there are approximately 12 million working population in Ghana- both in the formal and the informal sector, however, the formal sector constitute about 10 percent , or approximately one million of this huge workforce. The bulk of the working class in Ghana falls within the ambits of the unregulated informal sector.

Even though the membership of trade unions slide, “We generally have a good union environment”, Dr. Baah told CITY&BUSINESS GUIDE, noting that “since 1992, things have changed for everyone. We have the freedom to outreach. In some countries union members get killed because they try to negotiate a good deal for their members. It doesn’t happen in Ghana.”

In Ghana, the right to form or join a trade union has been institutionalized as a fundamental workers’ right and is at the core of trade unionism. It is central to the exercise of workers’ rights and freedoms and trade unions have fought countless battles with successive government to enact policies that protect the security and interests of the general working class.

The negotiations have usually centred on negotiations for wages and basic allowances. Sometimes the negotiations target installing structures that will ensure job security of workers.

TUC statistics show that organized labour rate is relatively higher in the utilities and mining and quarrying industries. The existence of trade unions at the workplace is lowest in the trade and commerce sub-sectors and construction industry.