FACTS ON POLICY: Union Membership Rates

January 16, 2007

The percentage of wage and salary workers with union memberships has been on the decline for more than 50 years.

• In 1945, 36 percent of all wage and salary workers in the United States were union members.   By 2000, that number had fallen to 14 percent and now stands at 13 percent.


• The decline in unionized labor is largely a private-sector phenomenon.   Over the past thirty years, the union membership rate in the private-sector workforce has gone from more than 26 percent to less than 8 percent.   The private sector employs 82 percent of all wage and salary workers.


• By contrast, the percent of unionized workers in the public sector has been relatively constant, averaging around 40 percent during the last thirty years.   In 2005, 37 percent of all public-sector employees were union members.


• While union membership has declined in the manufacturing sector, in the managerial and professional sector, union membership has been slowly increasing over the last five years.

Figure 1
U.S. Union Membership

Sources:

• U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Union Members in 2005 (Washington, D.C.), Table 3.

• U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey (Washington, D.C.), Table 34.

Related Links and Material:

• Leo Troy and Neil Sheflin, Union Sourcebook: Membership, Structure, Finance, Directory.

• Russell O. Wright, Chronology of Labor in the United States.

• John Pencavel, The Southern California Grocery Dispute and the State of Labor Unionism.

• U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Union Membership table of contents.

• Trinity University website, union membership and coverage database.

Quiz Source Information:

• U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Union Members in 2005 (Washington, D.C.), Table 5.