Due to rapid growth in nonunion jobs in 2023, the share of U.S. workers who are union members actually fell slightly, according to new numbers from the Labor Department.
Just 10% of the U.S. workforce belonged to unions in 2023, down from 10.1% in 2022. That's the lowest in Labor Department records dating back to 1983
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
The union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions--was 10.0 percent in 2023, little changed from the previous year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.4 million, also showed little movement over the year. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers. These data on union membership are collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 eligible households that obtains information on employment and unemployment among the nation's civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over. For further information, see the Technical Note in this news release.Highlights from the 2023 data:
--The union membership rate of public-sector workers (32.5 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (6.0 percent). (See table 3.)--The highest unionization rates were among workers in education, training, and library occupations (32.7 percent) and protective service occupations (31.9 percent). (See table 3.)--Men continued to have a higher union membership rate (10.5 percent) than women (9.5 percent). (See table 1.)--Black workers remained more likely to be union members than White, Asian, or Hispanic workers. (See table 1.)--Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 86 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($1,090 versus $1,263). (The comparisons of earnings in this news release are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences.) (See table 2.)--Among states, Hawaii and New York had the highest union membership rates (24.1 percent and 20.6 percent, respectively), while South Carolina and North Carolina had the lowest (2.3 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively). (See table 5.)
