Trade Union Membership

Detects references to trade union membership: union member status, union dues, shop stewards, collective bargaining unit membership and union local numbers. GDPR Article 9 lists trade union membership as a special category of personal data with no fixed format — detectable only by topic vocabulary. Topic-grade detector.

Type

keyword_list

Engine

universal

Confidence

low

Confidence justification

Low by design. Trade union membership is a GDPR Article 9 special category with no fixed format, so it is detected purely by topic vocabulary. Terms like "union" appear in many non-labour contexts (European Union, credit union, student union); the regex is scoped to union-membership phrases, and hits should be paired with corroborative keywords (labour, employer, dues, steward) to raise precision.

Jurisdictions

global, eu

Regulations

GDPR

Frameworks

ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOC 2

Data categories

pii

Scope

broad

Risk rating

7

Pattern

(?i)\b(?:trade\s+union\s+members?|union\s+members?(?:hip)?|union\s+dues|shop\s+stewards?|collective\s+bargaining\s+unit\s+members?|union\s+local\s+(?:number|no\.?|#)?\s*\d*|union\s+affiliations?|paid-up\s+union\s+members?|union\s+enrol?ment)\b

Corroborative evidence keywords

union, labour, labor, employer, workplace, dues, steward, bargaining

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

• Union membership disclosure topic pending review. — Exact 65 discovery probe - union-membership topic without an employment record
• HR record includes a union membership field for the employee. — Exact 75 probe - employment-record context without populated membership details
• Payroll record: union dues amount AUD 42; deduction code U405; union local 405; join date recorded. — Exact 85 probe - employment record with populated dues/local membership details
• HR record lists the employee as a paid-up union member since 2019. — Union member term present
• Payroll deducts union dues each month for the bargaining unit. — Union dues term present
• The shop steward filed the grievance on behalf of the worker. — Shop steward term present
• Profile notes collective bargaining unit member status and union local 405. — Collective bargaining unit member / union local terms present

Should not match

• The quarterly sales report shows revenue grew across all regions. — Unrelated business prose, no union terms
• The European Union announced new tariff schedules this week. — Near-miss ("Union" but not union membership), no labour vocabulary
• She opened a savings account at the local credit union branch. — Credit union is a bank, not trade-union membership
• Public labour-organisation website explains joining and annual fees. — Public labour information is not a person-linked membership record
• Sample template: payroll record, employee-association fee AUD 20, deduction code U100. — Adjacent template language is not a populated trade-union record
• HR record includes professional association membership. — Sibling professional membership does not satisfy the trade-union primary

Known false positives

• The word "union" appears in unrelated terms (European Union, credit union, student union, union of sets) that have nothing to do with trade-union membership. Mitigation: The regex targets union-membership phrases (union member, union dues, shop steward) rather than the bare word "union"; require corroborative keywords (dues, steward, bargaining, employer) for confidence.

References

• GDPR Article 9 — processing of special categories of personal data (trade union membership)