Skip to content

Raw data: Union membership continues to fall

All year long I kept hearing that labor unions were making a comeback in 2022. Apparently I was misled:

The good news, such as it is, is that the number of private sector union members went up by about 200,000. But that was only because the number of total workers went up. The unionization rate fell from 6.1% in 2021 to 6.0% in 2022.

Among public sector workers, the unionization rate fell from 33.9% to 33.1%.

23 thoughts on “Raw data: Union membership continues to fall

  1. Brett

    The devil is even worse in the details. Nearly all the gains were concentrated in four states, with California driving the lion's share and having both an increase in total union numbers and the union percentage . . . but it was all driven by greater public sector unionization, not private sector unionization.

    Big problem with the high profile union successes is that they often don't translate to that many workers. The Starbucks union effort might have won about 300 store votes, but each store only has maybe 1-2 dozen employees - maybe 7000-8000 workers total. That's peanuts compared to the overall labor force.

  2. rokeeffeDC

    More like this please. Teachers unions should whither away completely. They are not a force for the good for our children.

    1. painedumonde

      At the peril of feeding the troll, the continued complaints of poor education outcomes that conservatives lament have tracked right along with their defunding, deregulation, and privatisation. You get what you pay for.

      1. rokeeffeDC

        Teachers unions kept students at home way too long during the pandemic, which has nothing whatever to do with defunding, deregulation or privatization. We'll be paying for this folly for a long, long time. And then there's masks, which unions supported as an act of faith. I believe that any negligible protective effect of masks for kids was far outweighed by the harm to their learning and socialization.

          1. rokeeffeDC

            Yes, "I believe." Balancing risks and benefits is ALWAYS a judgment call. If you land on a different position, Godspeed. I believe masking kids did way more harm than good.

            1. aldoushickman

              "I believe masking kids did way more harm than good."

              Well, actually, it appears that you believe that masking kids did so much more harm than good that teachers unions ought to be abolished (despite not identifying how abolishing teachers unions would do anything to redress prospectively the vague harm you claim occurred historically).

              So yeah, it's nice that you have a belief. Always good for people to be arguing in faith (whether good or bad), I guess.

              1. rokeeffeDC

                Policy decisions -- balancing risks and benefits of courses of action inherently involve judgments -- i.e., BELIEF in the correctness of one's analysis.

          1. rokeeffeDC

            Masks make it more difficult to speak clearly and to hear masked people speaking. Speaking and hearing are essential to learning.

    2. Austin

      Don’t feed the troll. Academic achievement fell both in states that closed schools for years and states that barely closed them at all. It fell in states where teachers are highly unionized and in states where teachers can’t unionize. It fell at private and public schools. Just let rokeeffeDC howl into the wind.

      1. rokeeffeDC

        Troll here: I'm not clear on what word choices or phrasing in my comments could be characterized fairly as "howl[ing] in the wind." I would like to have a civil discussion without name-calling.

  3. middleoftheroaddem

    Within the public sector, we have not seen a broad expansion: not a lot of new public sector unions. In the private sector, some the fastest growing industries over the last twenty years (tech, pharma, media) have low union density. The newish push, education and retail being good examples, are high profile but don't capture many workers.

  4. Patrick G.

    It’ll get worse, too - the conservatives on the Supreme Court hate unions, especially Alito. They are welcoming anti-Union lawsuits with open arms.

  5. Austin

    Somehow it’s weird how nobody looks at that chart and thinks “huh, things are getting worse as unionization goes down. Maybe unions are why we didn’t seem to have as many problems in the 1950s?!”

    Nope. Instead it’s lots of “huh, everything bad is because of unions and we won’t be happy until they’re eradicated from the earth.” Even though everyone seems to be getting unhappier over time as unions wither away, with the unhappiest people with the crappiest outcomes increasingly living in the right-to-work states now.

  6. Heysus

    This news makes me very sad as I have been pushing for unions for year. Hey folks, if you want a descent salary, time off, etc. join a union. You cannot do it on your own. I belonged to a nurses union my whole life. Glad I did...

  7. VaLiberal

    That's distressing to learn. I've had hopes that we'd have a renaissance of a labor movement that would rebuild the middle class and move this country forward because images of scenes from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" keep resurfacing in my head.

  8. jamesepowell

    In this nation's culture, we are taught from a very early age that only we matter & other people do not. Caring about others is what losers do. Winners focus on themselves & their own. And one of the rules is that a gain for any other person is a loss for me. The religion of "fuck you I got mine."

  9. steve22

    A one know the composition of public unions? My guess would be that it is probably about 40% teachers, 30% police and fire and the rest a mix of others.

    Steve

Comments are closed.