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The share of employees that were members of a trade union in the United Kingdom in 2025 was 22.4 percent, a slight increase on the previous year, when 22 percent of employees were trade union members. This is also significantly lower than in 1995, when 32.4 percent of employees were members of a trade union.

Waves of industrial action in 2022

In May 2022, the UK's largest transport union, the National Union of Rail Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) elected to go on strike that summer. The transport worker strike soon spread to other sectors, with workers across various UK industries taking industrial action in protest at their pay and conditions. This reached a peak in the fourth quarter of 2022 when approximately 1.64 million working days were lost to industrial action, with around 661,000 workers on strike in the last three months of the year. The wave of industrial action continued into 2023, with wages only just starting to catch up with inflation after several months of falling wages. Since 2023, the quarter with the most working days lost was the first quarter of 2024, when 296,000 working days were lost and there were approximately 129,000 workers on strike. 

Uniting the unions

One of the biggest Trade Unions in the United Kingdom is Unite, with a membership of almost 1.25 million people in 2020/21. Unite was created in 2007 through the merger of Amicus and the Transport and General Workers Union, with Amicus itself being created in 2002 through the merger of the Manufacturing Science and Finance Union and the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union. The decline in union membership as well as the mergers of smaller unions has led to a decrease in the number of trade unions. Compared with 1999, there were 109 fewer unions in 2024. Of these unions, six had memberships of 250 thousand or more, and six had fewer than 100.