Read the text below and answer question.
Who needs unions?
Manual and service industry workers are often organized in labour unions, which attempt to ensure fair wages, reasonable working hours and safe working conditions for their members. British unions are known as trade unions because, as in Germany, they are largely organized
according to trade or skill: there is an engineers’ union, an electricians’ union, a train-drivers’ union, et cetera. In other countries, including France and Italy, unions are largely political: workers in different industries join unions with a particular political position.
Industrial relations tend to be better in countries, industries and companies where communications are good, i.e., where management consult workers on matters that will concern them, where neither side treats the other as an adversary, and when unions do not insist upon the preservation of completely uneconomic jobs and working practices. Although some employers and managers (and political parties) oppose the very existence of unions – even though, like doctors, lawyers, accountants and so on, they might themselves belong to a professional association with similar basic aims – many management theorists stress the necessity of unions. In the 1970s, Peter Drucker wrote that ‘Management is and has to be a power. Any power needs restraint and control – or else it becomes tyranny. The union serves an essential function in industrial society’. Yet one of the chief objectives of right-wing governments in the 1980s (e.g. in Britain and the USA) was to diminish the power of trade unions, and to deregulate labour markets in accordance with the ideal of free markets.
As a result of deregulation, working conditions in many industries in many countries have worsened, leading to the creation of a great many casual, part-time, unskilled jobs done by nonunionized workers. France, for example, has the lowest number of workers in trade unions in the
industrialized world. The unions now represent less than 10% of the French work force, and most of those are in the public sector. The vast majority of French workers seem to have rejected the confrontational politics of the main unions, notably the communist-controlled CGT. Consequently, when the largely non-unionized French lorry-drivers blocked all the motorways in the summer of 1992, striking over the introduction of a new driver’s licence with a penalty-point system (and over their working conditions in general), the French government found no one to negotiate with.
In fact, a number of politicians and business leaders are beginning to regret the weakness of unions. Some managers, including Antoine Riboud, the former head of the huge Danone food conglomerate, actively encourage unionization because they insist that a big company needs someone to represent and articulate the needs of the employees and act as a social partner to the employer. But there is clearly a problem if workers believe that the unions are incapable of doing this, and choose not to join them.
(MACKENZIE, Ian. English for Business Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. p. 50-51. Adaptado.)
Peter Drucker is mentioned, in the second paragraph, as an author who
