The percentage of U.S. workers who are members of unions remained at 11.1 percent last year, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The report was good news for organized labor, which has seen its share of the U.S. workforce shrink significantly over the last several decades.
Overall, 14.8 million workers nationally belong to a labor organization, also the same as last year. While a majority of union members, 7.6 million, work in the private sector, the public-sector numbers are not far off at 7.2 million. Another 1.6 million people are in workplaces that are covered by union contracts but have declined to join the organization.
The unionization rate reported Thursday represented a sharp decline from organized labor’s high point of 20.1 percent in 1983, the first year the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the number. However, while labor groups have shrunk as a percentage of the workforce, the total number of union members has remained fairly stable thanks to the growth of the economy. Thus, while the unionization rate was 11.8 percent as recently as 2011, the total number of union members that year was also 14.8 million.
The report found that the median weekly earnings of union workers were $980, while nonunion members received $779, but cautioned that this did not control for any factors that could explain the difference.
The job sectors with the highest unionization rates in 2015 were in “protective service occupations,” primarily law enforcement, at 36.3 percent and education at 35.5 percent. The lowest rates were for retail sales at 3.3 percent and farming and forestry at 1.9 percent.
The AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, issued a statement that didn’t directly address the numbers but expressed relief that unions had done as well as they did.
“The latest numbers on union density are simply another sign of how working people continued to make their voice on the job heard, despite relentless attempts to drown them out by anti-worker politicians and corporate interests. While not nearly enough, in 2015 millions of working people were able to bargain for a better life. A voice on the job matters to working people and we will continue to make our voices heard in the workplace and at the ballot box,” said AFL-CIO spokesman Eric Hauser.
Rick Berman, president of the business-backed Center for Union Facts, attributed the stability in the numbers to pro-union policies under President Obama. “Union membership is apparently receiving a boost from an activist National Labor Relations Board. By tilting the scales in favor of labor organizers, the board and the sympathetic Obama administration are propping up Big Labor rather than helping the rank-and-file,” he said.
