I’m interested in why so few people join unions any more. I joined a union about five years ago and have been impressed by how helpful it is. I consider my pay and conditions to be fair and know that this is basically due to the hard work of our union. Is there any research into what stops people from joining their union?
A few years ago, a reader told me about a time they’d been invited to a union meeting and felt trepidation about accepting. They described it as feeling like “a child worried about getting in trouble from the adults”.
They ended up not attending and, later, felt ashamed of their decision. The response from the expert I spoke with about that question was fascinating, and worth having a look at.
But the answer to your specific question goes way beyond workers worried that they might be put in a career naughty corner by considering unionism.
I asked Dr Isabella Dabaja, a lecturer in the business school at the University of Sydney, about why union membership is so low in Australia. She said that one of the main reasons is something called the “free rider” problem.
“Workers can and do still benefit from the work of unions even without joining them,” she says. “While the more members a union has, the more resources it has to support bargaining and leverage collective worker power through industrial action like strikes, non-unionised public sector workers still receive the wages and conditions won by [this bargaining and action].
While union members in sectors like education and training are higher than other sectors, they are still low compared with 10 years ago.
“For many workers today, there is a lack of awareness around what a union actually is, and often no clear incentive to become a union member, or an understanding of the moral reason you might join your union even though you don’t technically have to.”
So the free rider problem is exacerbated by a lack of understanding, or in some cases a wariness, of unionism more broadly.
“Years of strategic demonisation of unions by employers and political parties, as well as the consequences of anti-union regulatory reforms, have eroded public understanding of this moral imperative.”
Dabaja said that as these regulatory changes shrank the place for unions in our industrial relations system, what also shrank was an appreciation of union benefits among the public.
Most workers today, for example, are unlikely to be aware that union members take home a median of $251 more a week than non-unionised workers (according to 2025 statistics from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations). Many are also unaware that union fees are entirely tax-deductible.
In other words, your own experience – as part of which you’re conscious of what unions do and confident about the value of membership – is not the experience of most Australians.
While the proportion of union members in sectors such as education and training, where collective bargaining is common, is higher than in other sectors, this is still low compared with even 10 years ago.
And it is extremely low compared with the late 1940s and early ’50s, when two out of every three Australian workers were part of a union. Recently, however, there has been a small but significant increase in unionisation rates across the whole economy – from 12.5 per cent in 2021 to 13.1 per cent in 2024.
“The largest growth in membership has been among workers aged 15 to 24, most likely the result of young people entering the workforce and realising how little they are paid for their labour after years of low wage growth and rising living costs,” Dabaja says.
This is a particularly interesting trend given that many young people work in workplaces such as pubs or retail stores that tend not to be unionised. And that means they are less likely to have had any contact with union organisers.
However, Dabaja said that it’s now so difficult for younger people to make ends meet that a lack of union presence isn’t necessarily stopping them from joining unions.
“I speak to students about this issue regularly, many of whom are struggling with the cost-of-living crisis as well as rent and housing affordability. Last semester, a student explained to me that they would sometimes need to miss classes just to save the cost of the train fare into university,” she says.
“Without the guarantee of the kind of economic security afforded to previous generations of Australians, and the prospect of home ownership becoming a far-off dream for many, young people are looking for solutions to combat social and economic inequality again.”
Send your questions to Work Therapy by emailing jonathan@theinkbureau.com.au
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Jonathan Rivett is a writer based in Melbourne. He’s written about workplace culture and careers for more than a decade.