Trade unions are "doomed to sharing a diminishing harvest if they do not seriously readjust their policies", the general secretary of the Communications Workers' Union, Mr Con Scanlon, has warned.
Speaking at the closing session of his union's annual conference in Ennis, he said trade union leaders must face the "harsh reality" that less than half the Irish workforce "is not or does not want to be represented by a trade union."
It had taken the Irish trade union movement 100 years to achieve a membership of 700,000, but while unions continued to grow, "our proportion of the workforce is declining". Painful changes were needed.
Better services must be provided to existing members, who must be "acknowledged as consumers". In that sense, unions were now businesses.
Members were more discerning and increasingly sought value for money. Unions also had to "create new forms of participation".
Electronic branches and "virtual membership is already a reality in the CWU" and new structures were needed to cater for the needs of those in parttime work, job sharing, atypical work and teleworking, as well as "the shortening life cycles of many jobs in our economy."
New types of agreements were also needed to reflect the changing demands of companies and employees.
The introduction of Employee Share Option schemes, which had been pioneered in Eircom and An Post by the CWU, was an example of this.