Union Membership Rate in U.S. Held at Record Low of 10.7% in '17

(Bloomberg) -- The share of American workers belonging to labor unions held steady in 2017, matching the historic low of 10.7 percent set in the prior year, according to a Labor Department report Friday.

The membership rate for wage and salary employees is down from 20.1 percent in 1983, when the government began tracking comparable data, and from more than one-third of workers in the 1950s, according to separate figures looking further back.

While the nation’s total employment of wage and salary workers rose by 1.8 million last year, the number of union members increased by just 262,000, to 14.8 million. That’s down from 17.7 million union workers in 1983.

The percentage of government employees in unions, though steady from the prior year at 34.4 percent, continued to be more than five times the 6.5 percent rate for private sector workers.

Among states, South Carolina continued to have the lowest unionization rate, 2.6 percent, followed by North Carolina at 3.4 percent. New York had the highest, 23.8 percent, with Hawaii second, at 21.3 percent.

Median weekly earnings of union members continued to be higher than those of comparable nonunion workers in both the government ($1,104 vs. $917) and private sector ($984 vs. $816), the data showed.

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, put a positive spin on the data, saying the increase in the number of union members reflects “critical organizing victories across a range of industries.” Beyond the numbers lies a “growing movement of working people that can’t be measured as easily,” he said in a statement.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jordan Yadoo in Washington at jyadoo@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Tanzi at atanzi@bloomberg.net, Scott Lanman, Vince Golle

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