[chrisseaton]

This is all interesting stuff and makes a lot of sense.

I'm thinking more about non-traditional potential unions. Like if people seriously tried to set up a computer scientist union and tried to unionise a large proportion of workers at white-collar places like Google in the UK, I would imagine that some of the push-back they would get would be, for example Liberal Democrat voters not wanting to pay for Labour election campaigns.

Maybe a computer scientist union could simply choose not to be associated with Labour, then.

[vidarh]

I think any union covering more "white collar" type jobs probably would want to remain unaffiliated. Some also do for other reasons - e.g. Prospect [1], which is for engineers, managers and scientists. Their main reason has been that they organise a lot of people in the civil service and other parts of government, and e.g. BECTU (the broadcasting union) disaffiliated from Labour when it merged with Prospect for that reason, but it's likely that parts of Prospect's membership would also be more politically diverse than many other unions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_(trade_union)