Are unions coming back into favour?

Perhaps I'm grasping at straws, but I can't shake the feeling that attitudes toward trade unions are shifting amongst some key groups, and that this might point to a more hopeful future.

In politics the direction of travel is most clear. Obviously Labour has adopted more union-friendly policy positions that it has held for the past 20+ years, union leaders have more influence on Labour, and Labour MPs are now far more openly pro-union. But it's happening in the US too. Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren talk a lot more about unions - and how to make them stronger - than Obama ever managed.

But there's also increasingly discussion of bargaining power (or the lack of it) and how this affects inequality / distribution of wealth to capital v labour etc in other areas too. Leo Strine's piece in the FT last week was particularly striking. In the detail of the critique of the failure of investors to look at what happens to workers, and some 'governance-y' reform ideas (like setting up board committees on fair treatment of employees) he calls for labour law reform to give unions a "fairer opportunity to represent and bargain for their workers".

More generally, an increasingly widely-held view is that the growth in economic inequality is at least partly about falling levels of union membership and collective bargaining (it's not just about technology, global shifts etc). And the flip side of this is that more policy wonks are attracted to the idea of more flexible ways of affecting distribution of rewards than trying to determine this all via legal / regulatory interventions (which can always be reversed). Unions look like a pretty good fit there too.

To be clear, this is all mood music, and mood music never won anything for anyone. If Labour and the Democrats don't win, nothing changes, at least for now. Trump won't lift a finger to make it easier for workers to unionise. And the sort of people that Boris Johnson surrounds himself with are more likely to think unions still have *too much* power, not too little.

And we also need to be open-eyed about the challenges to unions. They need to recruit a lot of younger workers just to stand still. Yet experience of, support for, knowledge of unions is not part of the cultural fabric, or passed down through families, in the way it would have been a few decades back. This is a deep problem to address.

However, overall it does feel like there should be grounds for some optimism. A bit of luck with politics, perhaps a big dispute or two that demonstrates that inequity working people still face on the job, and some principled leadership could start to reorient politics and policy around unions.