Union membership up after years of declines

Add comment January 25th, 2008

Buoyed by union growth in California, national membership in organized labor groups grew in 2007 as a share of the work force for the first time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking union rolls. From The Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C.:

Unions added about 310,000 members last year, raising the unionized share of the workforce to 12.1 percent from 12.0 percent in 2006.

The increase is small, and may well reflect statistical variation rather than an actual increase in the union membership share, but the uptick is striking because it is the first time since the BLS began collecting annual union membership rates in 1983 that the union share has increased.

Read the whole news release here.

An interesting side note is that the Rockford metropolitan area has bucked the trend against unionization over the last two decades, according to data from UnionStats.com.

In 1986, just 12.1 percent of employed workers here were union members. By 2006, that share had grown to 15.3 percent of the workforce. But the reason for the growth was the robust expansion of public sector unions; private sector membership declined as a share of the work force. Union workers made up 28.6 percent of public employees here in 1986, but by 2006 half of all public employees were unionized.