Overlooked in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual release announcing union membership were data indicating that federal unions added about 40,000 members in 2015, the largest net increase since 2008.
At the same time, a faster pick-up in federal hiring resulted in the percentage of federal unionized workers showing little change, from 27.5 percent of the federal workforce in 2014 to 27.3 percent in 2015. Ten years ago, BLS reported that unionized workers accounted for 27.8 percent of the federal workforce.
