Freelancers of the world, unite!

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: The conventional wisdom is that, for better or worse, trade unionism is in irreversible long-term decline, at least in the world’s leading economies. In America, for example, only 12.5% of the workforce now belongs to a union and a mere 7.8% of private-sector workers, down from one-third in 1960. Most forecasts predict that this trend will continue, perhaps until unionism is confined to museums and history books. But Sara Horowitz is determined to prove them wrong.

Ms Horowitz is trying to reinvent the trade union to meet the needs of today’s workers-specifically, the fast-growing army of freelancers who flit from one employer to another. These workers have largely been ignored by the traditional trade unions, which are wedded to the shrinking band of workers who expect to spend the bulk of their careers with one employer, particularly in the public sector, where over one-third of workers are still unionised. In 2001 Ms Horowitz launched what is now called the Freelancers Union. Today, with 37,000 members, it has already become the seventh-largest union in New York state, and could soon be far bigger. In the next few weeks it will open a branch in Connecticut, with three more states to follow by next spring. After that it has plans to expand into the rest of the country, and perhaps even beyond.

The Freelancers Union-with a markedly different business model from traditional trade unions which does not involve striking-has its roots in a year that Ms Horowitz spent at Harvard University, a world away from the mines and factory gates where most earlier advances by the trade-union movement took place. Her grandfather was vice-president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York and her father was a union lawyer, so Ms Horowitz has unionism in her blood. She took her first job with a union at the age of 18. After attending law school, she represented union members in a number of lawsuits until a bizarre dispute over the classification of sous-chefs working in the rich-patients wing of a hospital convinced her that a radical new approach was needed.