Union Membership in 2011

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2011, the union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of a union--was 11.8 percent, essentially unchanged from 11.9 percent in 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.8 million, also showed little movement over the year. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was  20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers. 

The data on union membership were collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 households that obtains information on employment and unemployment among the nation's civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over. ...

Highlights from the 2011 data:

--Public-sector workers had a union membership rate (37.0 percent) more than five times higher than that of private-sector workers (6.9 percent). (See table 3.) --Workers in education, training, and library occupations had the highest unionization rate, at 36.8 percent, while the lowest rate occurred in sales and related occupations (3.0 percent). (See table 3.) --Black workers were more likely to be union members than were white, Asian, or Hispanic workers. (See table 1.) --Among states, New York continued to have the highest union membership rate (24.1 percent) and North Carolina again had the lowest rate (2.9 percent). (See table 5.)