Two hundred trade unionists turned up to lobby us at the meeting we attended. The point I was trying to make, Mr Leigh, was about the relationship between a good union and a good employer.
My hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer) raised union problems. There are two ways of looking at the matter. Either the Government do not know what the problems are, in which case they are negligent, or they know the problems and want them to be exploited. There are major difficulties in the path of any trade union that wants to keep proper records.
The first difficulty is the churn rate. My hon. Friend said that it was 10% or 15%, but the churn rate for the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, or USDAW, for example, is 25% or sometimes 30%. Every year it has to replace 25% of its membership. A lot of members go on to other jobs. They pay their union dues by direct debit and think they do not need to bother to tell the union that they have changed workplace, because they are still working in the same business and paying their union dues. That is difficult for unions. There are lots of practical issues such as that.
The biggest employer in my area is the North sea oil and gas industry, which employs about 30,000 workers offshore and 150,000 onshore. All have different status in the workplace. Many union members are self-employed and many work from company to company. At the moment, there is a massive skill shortage in the North sea. Wages are being ramped up—not a problem in the rest of the country, I know—because people are being enticed to other companies, but still working in the same business, travelling on the same unsafe helicopters and paying their union dues as usual through their bank accounts. Those are all massive problems.