I might add that the German trade unions had been virtually wiped out by Hitler. They were re-created after 1945 largely with the help of the British TUC. The big difference was instead of over a hundred different unions in the UK there was only IIRC six unions. The situation has of course changed since then and there are far fewer UK unions, not just due to entire industries disappearing but unions with a common interest merging. Union membership has of course fallen but not as much as people think. For a long time unions over estimated their membership, quite often due to retired and deceased members being retained on membership lists, not as a means of exaggerating their membership but more often due to their being no established mechanism to remove such members. It was surprisingly a piece of anti-union legislation that alerted the unions to this situation, the Trade Union Reform Act which required the unions to keep a proper register of their members. The administration of some unions was shambolic, I recall a trade union asking me about an employee who was paying his subscriptions but they said they had no record of his membership. So I contacted the said employee who informed me that he had been the local branch secretary for years!