Until recently, the influence of Britain trade union would like to emphasize at labor market and domestic political. As we all know, trade union have made an efforts on different areas of labour market such as wages, working conditions, welfares and so on. Moreover, due to the relationship between British trade union and labor party, a serous of the politics would be influenced by trade union.
Regarding of trade union, it is said (TUC, 2014) that trade union is an association of employees formed to improve their abilities to negotiate working conditions and rewards with their employers and to present similar interest including the political area beyond the workplace. It demonstrated that the workers are entitled to own the rights to complain their unfair situations and have a platform to negotiate with their employers. And the trade union would like to use the collective bargain to make a negotiation with the employers. "A good example is the question of the regulation of working time. Towards the end of the nineteenth century a legally enforced eight hours day was a prominent demand of many socialist" (Hyman 2003 pp46). Therefore, there is an essential function of trade union to help the worker with the unfairness.
However, the scale of trade union is not built in one day and it had a long historical evolution. According to Hyman (2003 pp45), the expansion of trade unionism progressively begun from 1960 and it is estimated that there were over 1000 in Britain, and it had a number fallen rapidly unfortunately after the second world war with no significant basis in craft production like the mining, textiles or railways but there are still 200 survive. It seems that the shift of most trade union was from large scale to small. On the other hand, "the formation by merger of a small group of numerically dominant unions" (Hyman 2003), and meanwhile the structure of employment were changing.
