The Labor Department reported Friday that union membership fell marginally in the last year, dropping to 10.5 percent of the workforce, down 0.2 percentage points from the previous year. In absolute terms, there were 14.7 million people in unions, roughly the same number as the previous year.
Total private sector union membership was up about 18,000 people in the last year. That increase, however, was not sufficient to increase membership relative to the workforce.
“Due to the 1.7 percent increase in employment in the private sector, the share of private sector workers represented by a union declined, from 7.3 percent to 7.2 percent,” said Heidi Shierholz, a Labor Department economist during the Obama administration, now with the Economic Policies Institute, a left-of-center think tank.
Unions have nevertheless struggled in recent decades as the economy and workforce have changed. They have lost 1.3 million members over the last decade.
There are currently 7.6 million people in private sector unions, according to the bureau, and 7.2 million in public sector unions. Most of the overall decline from the previous year was in public sector unions, which fell from 34.4 percent of the workforce to 33.9. The slip follows the Supreme Court’s decision in last year’s Janus v. AFSCME case, which said that public sector workers cannot be forced to join or otherwise support a union. Still, the decline, about 80,000 workers total, was less than expected, given the sweeping nature of the decision.
Public sector workers are unionized at about five times the rate of private sector ones. Unionization was the highest in law enforcement and other security-related fields and in education, with both at about 34 percent. Unionization was the lowest in agriculture, fishing and forestry at a mere 2 percent.
A lot of further data on the unionization usually provided by the department’s report was not available. “One of the many negative effects of the government shutdown is that the release of the Current Population Survey public microdata files — the data needed to do additional tabulations — has been delayed,” Shierholz said.
The AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, did not issue a direct statement on the numbers and a spokesman could not be reached for comment. However on its official Twitter account it said: “2018 was one of the best years in history. Collective action is on the rise.”
