Coverage: Union membership hits new low

The number of American workers in unions fell to the lowest level on record in 2016, showing a return to the downward trend for organized labor after membership figures had stabilized in recent years.

Eric Morath and Kris Maher of The Wall Street Journal have the news:

Only 10.7% of workers were union members last year, down from 11.1% in 2015, and from more than 20% in the early 1980s. It is unclear whether any of Republican President Donald Trump’s policies could reverse this decadeslong slide in private-sector union membership, especially when unions were unable to gain traction with a union-friendly Democrat in the White House.

The share of union members in the workforce stabilized between 2012 and 2015 after suffering losses during President Barack Obama’s first years in office. At the same time, the total number of union workers increased along with growing employment. Still, while unions went into the Obama administration with optimism, their biggest priority, getting a law passed to make it easier to organize workers, was sidelined within months of his presidency as other issues took precedence.

Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said last year’s drop in union membership was evidence of continuing attacks by Republican politicians and corporations.

He said that his own union, which represents public employees, was able to add 12,000 members over the past year, thanks to its organizing efforts, “even in the face of an antilabor onslaught.”

Jeff Cox of CNBC.com reported that a third of all union members work for the government:

More than one in three union members is a public sector worker, with the private sector accounting for just 6.4 percent of the total. Education, training and library constitute the largest sector in the union ranks, at 34.6 percent.

Organized labor members still could boast higher wages, with average weekly earnings of $1,004 compared to $802 for nonunion, the BLS said. Some 13.1 percent of full-time workers belonged to unions, while the share was just 6.7 percent for part-time.

The highest-salaried union workers worked in legal professions and had a median weekly salary of $1,419. The lowest was food serving and preparation at $459.

In the public sector, 43.9 percent of local government workers are affiliated, while the total is 32.8 percent for state and 31.1 percent for federal. Unionized federal government workers had a median weekly salary of $1,188, while state union jobs paid $883 and local government positions had a salary of $817.

Food service establishments at 2 percent comprise the lowest share of union workers, while transportation and utilities led at more than 20 percent.

Peter Schmidt of the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that faculty unions are on the rise:

In the first nine months of 2016 alone, the National Labor Relations Board certified 20 new collective-bargaining units at private colleges, concludes the study, published online this week in the Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy. SEIU’s organizing campaign accounted for 90 percent of that figure, which could rise or fall depending on the results of litigation over union drives.

“The growth in private-sector faculty representation and bargaining constitutes a major new shift in higher education,” says an article summarizing the study’s findings. Although public-sector faculty unions remain much more common, the growth in their numbers has been much slower, it says.

The article credits the activism of groups such as New Faculty Majority and the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor for part of the union growth. Of the 20 new faculty unions certified in the first nine months of last year, 19 represented non-tenure-track faculty members at private colleges, with nearly two-thirds representing both full- and part-time contingent faculty members, just over one-fourth exclusively representing part-timers, and about a tenth exclusively representing full-timers.

At private colleges that held union elections, an average of nearly 73 percent of faculty members who cast ballots voted in favor of forming collective-bargaining units.