The share of workers in the United States who are union members dropped to 10% in 2023, a record low, even as organized labor received outsize attention.
The decline was a subtle drop from the year before, when union membership sat at 10.1%. The total number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions in 2023 was 14.4 million, according to data released on Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That marks a significant decline from 1983, when data for the statistic first became available. Then, more than 40 years ago, the union membership rate sat at over 20% of workers in the U.S.
The latest numbers show that the membership rate of public-sector employees was five times higher (32.5%) than the 6% membership rate among private-sector workers.
The new record may be a bit surprising, given the splashy year that unions have had.
The United Auto Workers scored major concessions from the Big Three automakers after weeks of highly publicized work stoppages, with UAW President Shawn Fain becoming a fixture in the news. The deals were finally reached in October.
And last summer, UPS was top of mind as the Teamsters pushed negotiations right up to the deadline for a strike. A strike would have torn through the economy and roiled supply chains, as some 6% of the country’s gross domestic product travels through UPS, and the labor contract represents the largest private-sector union agreement in North America.
Dan Bowling, a visiting professor at Georgia State’s law school who recently left Duke University after spending two decades teaching labor law classes there, said that he was somewhat surprised by the drop to 10% but not shocked, given long-term trends.
“I think the assumption is that labor law is exploding all around us, but union membership continues to decline — that’s union membership on the ground,” Bowling told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. “Given the amount of attention, you would think unions had tripled in size this year.”
One reason that union membership might be declining is the shift in society away from mass-production jobs (for instance, at auto plants) toward more tech-heavy careers and jobs that traditionally haven’t been tied to unions.
There has also been a population movement out of more pro-union states and into “right-to-work” states where union membership might not be as prevalent.
“The continued migration of people from union states to predominantly non-union states has an effect,” Bowling said.
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The strikes and news about UAW, UPS, and others are also somewhat coincidental, according to Bowling, who noted that the buzz didn’t necessarily mark a resurgence of new union activity but rather was the culmination of existing union contracts that happened to come to an end at around the same time.
Last year’s annual dip comes even as President Joe Biden has branded himself the most pro-union president in history and worked to strengthen and empower organized labor. During the UAW strikes, Biden broke the presidential mold and joined a UAW picket line.