Glass Half-Full: Despite falling to an all-time low, unions celebrate union membership rates
Putting on a happy face depends on one's point of view.
Despite last week’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) indicating that, as a percentage of the U.S. workforce, union density in the United States has fallen to an all-time low, unions seem to be very happy with the actual numbers.
Union membership fell as a percentage of the U.S. workforce to 10.1 percent, down from 10.3 percent in 2021, according to last week’s BLS report. However, unions actually added 273,000 members—200,000 of which were from already-unionized employers hiring.
Although unions added 273,000 members, the growth of non-union employers adding or rehiring 5.3 million new workers as the economy recovered from the COVID-19 lockdowns far outweighed the addition of union members.
So, while the BLS data disappointed some pro-union writers, the AFL-CIO—the nation’s largest federation—saw the rise in union members as encouraging sign.
“While the data also showed a slight dip in nationwide union density,” the AFL-CIO stated on its website, “the real story is that hundreds of thousands of workers overcame the odds to join a union last year in a system rigged against them.”
Meanwhile, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—the 2 million-member union behind the Fight for $15 movement and the campaign to unionize Starbucks—tweeted this out to its nearly 239K Twitter followers:
The United Steelworkers tweeted “This is great news!” to its more than 52K Twitter followers:
While the number of non-union job growth outweighed the growth of union members, and despite the fact that most of the headlines have focused on union density falling to a “record low,” unions in 2022 were more active than in the past with more workers unionizing.
Whether unions can maintain the momentum will be largely dependent on the state of the economy, as well as unions ability to capitalize on the growth of interest in unions by ‘Gen Z’ workers.