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“A trade union is an independant self-regulating organization of workers created to protect and advance the interests of its members through collective action.” Over recent years, it has become fashionable in many quarters to write off Britain’s trade unions, to label them as obsolete institutions out of touch with new realities and incapable of change. In today’s world of individual employment contracts, performance-related pay schemes, Human Resource and Total Quality Management and all the other ingredients of the so-called ‘new’ workplace, trade unions are often regarded as anachronistic obstacles preventing success of the market economy. As collective voluntary organizations that represent employees in the workplace, it is argued, trade unions no longer serve a useful purpose. The main priority of this essay is to represent the arguments for and against the relevance of trade unions in todays working society. Furthermore, I shall comment on the future of the trade union movement, based upon the facts and findings that helped construct this text. Trade unions exist because an individual worker has very little power to influence decisions that are made about his or her job. The greatest advantage in j