The Department of Labor released its annual tally of union membership on Friday. To no one’s surprise, it is down once again. Only 11.1 percent of all workers, and only 6.6 percent of private sector workers, belonged to labor unions in 2014, down from 11.3 and 6.7 percent, respectively a year earlier.
It has been a long slide — the overall number is down from 20.1 percent unionized in 1983, the first year for which there are directly comparable statistics. But there are numbers from before that time, and as Heritage labor economist James Sherk points out, they show last year’s level of union membership to be the lowest in the U.S. since 1912.
Local and federal government employees were among the only groups where unions grew last year. Among state government employees, the number of union members declined by 99,000 from their 2013 levels. It is clear why unions fought so hard in 2012 and 2014 to defeat Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker, whose 2011 union reforms have prompted tens of thousands of public employees in his state to resign their membership.
With fewer workers than ever interested in unionization, it is also easy to see why unions have resorted to stealing from the less fortunate. They have desperately attempted to use their connections in Democratic-run state governments to force daycare and health care workers to pay dues against their will, just because the children they watch or the disabled family members they care for receive government benefits. Thanks to vigorous legal challenges by the unions’ victims, courts have not looked kindly upon such schemes.
Unions are losing ground especially rapidly in traditional labor strongholds. Among the biggest state losers of union members was Michigan, where the rolls declined by 48,000 during the first full year after the state’s right-to-work law took effect. The biggest loser was Washington State (at 55,000), where after years of union intransigence and hostility, Boeing has finally begun moving thousands of jobs away to right-to-work Oklahoma and South Carolina.
But the most dispiriting number for the union bosses in recent years has to be the distribution of union membership by age. For today’s younger workers, unions aren’t even a consideration. The average union member is substantially older than the average American worker. The over-65 crowd is the only age cohort to see a modest numerical increase in union membership since Obama took office in 2009 — among all other workers, membership is down by 907,000 over that period. Under age 25, unionization is almost non-existent today at 4.5 percent for all workers, public and private included.
President Obama, who has pulled so many strings to save organized labor from irrelevance — even violating the Constitution to make illegal appointments to the National Labor Relations Board — hasn’t given up just yet. He indicated as much in his State of the Union Address last week. “We still need laws that strengthen rather than weaken unions, and give American workers a voice,” he said.
But increasingly, the voice of Big Labor’s leaders is a shrill, self-serving political voice that American workers do not agree with or want representing them. It is also a voice which, as it becomes progressively weaker, will be ever more dependent on Democratic politicians’ generosity for its survival than it has been in the past.
