This paper examines administrative/clerical work organization in trade unions. It argues that this work is currently based on outdated human resource practices and assumptions and that it is undervalued leading to dissatisfaction among clerical workers and inequality and ineffectiveness in unions. The paper further argues that the current organization of administrative work is not consistent with unions' use of mobilizing, organizing and network strategies and that unions must find ways to maximize the full potential of their human resources in order to increase their effectiveness.Trade unions in advanced, Anglo-Saxon, industrialized economies have been experiencing a decline in union membership (Carter and Cooper 2002;Milkman and Voss 2004;Peetz 2006). This has partly been attributed to external, structural factors such as the demise of specific industries where unions traditionally held a strong-hold (Freeman 1995;Griffin and Svensen 1996) and the deregulation of union-protective industrial relations systems (Boxall and Haynes 1997;Peetz 2006). Union decline has also been explained by the actions and behaviors of trade unions themselves, such as an overreliance on institutional supports like 'arbitration' (Boxall and Haynes 1997;Gahan 1996) and the 'closed shop' (Fox, Howard, and Pittard 1995;Hyman 1975); and sexist, xenophobic and other exclusionary practices that preclude the full participation of women (Franzway 2000;McBride 2001;Munro 2001), people from nonEnglish speaking backgrounds (NESB) (Nicolaou 1991) and young people (Costa 1997;Mitchell 1999). It is also argued that unions have more control over their own practices than they do over their environment and, over the past two decades, the union revitalization literature has focused on strategies that address union practices and behaviors (Heery and Fosh 1990;Strauss, Gallagher, and