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MANAGEMENT UPDATE.

ARE PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS LOSING GROUND?

Last week, the Center for Economic and Policy Research provided a “data byte” update on the 9.9% of US workers in 2024 who are union members. While public sector union membership (32.2%) continues to dramatically outpace the private sector (5.9%), both have experienced drops in “union density”, the number of union members as a percent of the total workforce.


As author Hayley Brown and Emma Curchin point out in their January 28, 2025 article about union membership, the number of public sector union members was 15,000 higher in 2024 than in 2023, but in relation to total public sector employment, union membership declined by 0.3 percentage points, dropping from 32.5% to 32.3%. That’s about a 1.4 percentage point reduction since 2019, when 33.6% of public sector employees were union members.



A few other facts from CEPR about what’s happening with US union membership:


  • Union membership is higher in local than in state governments (38.2% vs. 27. 9%). Based on total employment of each, the drop between 2019 and 2024 was 1.2% for local governments and 1.5% for states. Federal union membership in 2024 (25.3%) dropped during the 2019-2024 period by 0.3%.


  • Looking at both public and private sectors, membership among Black workers (11.7%) was higher than other racial or ethnic groups. That compares to white workers (10%); Asian Pacific Islanders (8.9%) and Hispanic employees (8.5%). While the percentage of Black union members dipped slightly in terms of their total employment, the number of Black union members rose by 250,000 between 2019 and 2024.


  • The CEPR notes the 9.2% union membership rate among individuals who are disabled is lower than the rate of those without any disability (9.9%)


  • Union membership is much higher in Canada than in the United States: 28.3% vs. 9.9 


As always, union membership depends on a variety of factors, including the reaction of employees to their individual employers, the external events that affect their livelihood, laws and court decisions, and a variety of other political and social factors.  For example, Brown and Curchin raise a question in their piece about the current effect of corporate and political moves to get workers back to the office and the power of unions to mitigate that trend, which could become a new reason to join. They also note that “unions provide a key mechanism to fight discrimination and can act as a key critical safeguard when other avenues fall short.”


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