Despite A very pro-Labor Biden administration, unionization rates fell again in the US in 2022, according the fresh data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics last week.
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Eleven states had union membership rates below 5.0% in 2022. South Carolina had the lowest rate (1.7%), followed by North Carolina (2.8%) and South Dakota (3.1%).
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The BLS found that at the end of last year, the overall US union membership rate was 10.1%, down from 10.3% in 2021. In fact, the 2022 unionization rate is now the lowest on record. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1%.
The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.3 million in 2022, increased by 273,000, or 1.9%, from 2021.
However, the total number of wage and salary workers grew by 5.3 million (mostly among non-union workers), or 3.9%. This disproportionately large increase in the number of total wage and salary employment compared with the increase in the number of union members led to a decrease in the union membership rate.
In 2022, the BLS says, men continued to have a higher union membership rate (10.5%) than women (9.6%). However, the gap between union membership rates for men and women has narrowed considerably since 1983, when rates for men and women were 24.7% and 14.6%, respectively. The difference between the unionization rates for men and women has been less than 1 percentage point in each of the last three years; the difference back in 1983 was 10.1 percentage points.
For a long time, the prototypical union shop hasn’t been a private auto or steel plant but a public school. Yet the unionized share of government employees also fell last year.
The union membership rate of public-sector workers as 33.1% in 2022, versus 31.8% in 2021. Still, the rate of unionization for government workers continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (6.0%, from 6.1% in 2021).
Interestingly, workers ages 45 to 54 had the highest union membership rate in 2022, at 12.6%. Younger workers - those ages 16 to 24) had the lowest union membership rate, at 4.4%.
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Eleven states had union membership rates below 5.0% in 2022. South Carolina had the lowest rate (1.7%), followed by North Carolina (2.8%) and South Dakota (3.1%).
Two states had union membership rates over 20.0% in 2022: Hawaii (21.9%) and New York (20.7%).
The workforce in 2012 was 11.3% unionized, and in 2002 it was 13.3%. Organized labor hasn’t been able to stop the trend, despite frantic unionization drives, including many aimed at non-traditional members, such as the university graduate students, some of whom work under the United Auto Workers banner. The 6.0% of private sectors who are in unions is down from 8.6% two decades ago.
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