Several weeks ago IT Week published a letter from a Paul Sladen on the unpopularity of IT as a career. He argued that the main reason for the falling numbers of IT graduates is the lack of stability offered by employers, who are happy to axe staff and move work offshore before you can say “minimum wage”.

It is a valid and pretty common explanation for the looming skills crisis, but what jumped out at me about Sladen’s letter was not his plea for employers to nurture their IT staff but his final line, in which he argued that one of the other contributory factors to IT’s unpopularity was “a lack of union representation”.

Now, as you can probably imagine, this is hardly a popular line of reasoning in an age when business leaders are lauded and unions are regarded with a degree of suspicion usually reserved for South American revolutionaries.

The decline of the unions and IT professionals’ failure to unionise have long been bugbears of mine and, unfashionable as it may be, I can’t help but wonder if many of the UK IT industry’s well-documented problems could not be better addressed with the help of a strong and coherent IT union.

Of course, there are unions available to IT professionals – including the general workers unions Amicus and Prospect, the services union PCS and telecommunications union Connect – and I’m sure they all do a good job. However, only Connect could claim to be wholly focused on IT and with fewer than 20,000 members it represents a fraction of the million or so IT professionals estimated to be working in the UK.

Surely a strong IT trade union could help address the fear among potential entrants to the industry that they would be joining a sector where their job could be outsourced tomorrow. Equally, it could also help tackle the chronic lack of formal IT training offered by many employers and the poor work-life bal ance and average £5,000 a year unpaid overtime experienced by many IT professionals.

Given that IT jobs enjoy relatively good pay and conditions, and the sector’s mainstream emergence followed hot on the heels of the miners’ riots, it is easy to understand why IT has never been closely associated with the union movement.

However, it remains strange that one of the most important sectors of the UK economy has such limited union representation. While I am fully aware that IT needs a militant protectionist union as much as it needs another three-letter acronym, a modern and dynamic IT trade union could play a critical role in making technology an attractive career choice.