Union membership fell to record low in 2022 despite high-profile labor wins
Zachary Halaschak
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The share of workers who are part of a labor union was the lowest on record last year, even as organized labor made notable gains at Starbucks and other high-profile businesses.
The percentage of wage and salary workers who were members of unions dropped to 10.1% in 2022, down from 10.3% the year before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Thursday.
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The total number of union workers actually grew by 273,000, but the percentage went down because the total number of workers rose by over 5 million. The nearly 300,000-member growth was the biggest annual uptick in 14 years.
Union membership has flagged over the past several decades, though. In 1983, the first year where data are available, the membership rate was nearly double what it is now, clocking in at a hefty 20.1% of the population, according to the BLS.
Public-sector workers are far more likely to be union members today. One in three government workers were union members last year, compared to a mere 6% of private-sector workers.
Protective service occupations and education, training, and library workers had the highest unionization rate, with more than 30% of workers in those occupations being involved in organized labor.
Strikes and union activity also surged during 2022. There were 374 worker strikes last year, according to researchers at Cornell University, a 39% increase from the year before. There were several factors at play in the growth, a big one being that workers had far more leverage this past year due to mass labor shortages.
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Late in 2021, the first Starbucks store in the United States voted to unionize. That set off a unionization wave at the coffee chain’s other stores across the country. Since then, a total of more than 300 of the company’s 9,000 locations in the U.S. have petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for a union vote.
Earlier last year, an Amazon warehouse in New York became the first to vote in favor of unionizing, an REI store in New York did the same, and a Trader Joe’s in Massachusetts became the first to file for a union election.