U.S. Labor Movement Hasn't Reversed Its Decline: Jacobin

Each January, union activists and observers get treated to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) annual union membership report. It’s a bird’s-eye view of the state of the US labor movement, by the numbers, by industry, by state, Jacobin magazine reported.

Photo Insert: Union jobs are growing, but non-union jobs are growing faster.

The sobering results of this year’s report are somewhat predictable even if the particulars are somewhat unreliable (the state-level data seems particularly noisy, with the Texas American Federation of Labor (AFL) saying it doesn’t trust the figures and Maine’s numbers telegraphing a probably much-exaggerated 32 percent drop in membership.

Simply put, the union movement continued its decades-long trend of decline.

Union density has been falling since the 1950s, and in absolute numbers since the 1980s, despite continued population and job growth. At its peak, around one in three us workers were union members; that number is now one in 10.

In 1979, there were around 21 million workers with union cards; there are now around 14 million.

The shrinking membership matters in two ways: The higher the percentage of workers who are unionized, the more economy-wide pressure they can exert to boost wages, benefits, and working conditions, and the higher the number of union workers, the bigger the social and electoral base for a progressive working-class politics.

The headline grabber in this year’s release is that there were, by the bureau’s count, 273,000 more union members in 2022 than in 2021, but overall union density — the percentage of workers who are union members — continued to fall to its lowest level (10.1 percent) since the 1920s.

How does that happen? Union jobs are growing, but non-union jobs are growing faster. Since 1983, the bureau has recorded 14 year-over-year instances of union membership growth and 25 instances of decline.

In all cases but two, density was flat or fell. In 2022, the US workforce expanded by about 3.5 percent and the number of union members ticked up by about 2 percent.

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