United States: rate of union membership rises despite fall in member numbers, due to decline in wage and salary employment

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of workers in the US who are members of a trade union fell by 321,000 to 14.3 million, according to a report published on 22 January by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which is part of the US Department of Labor. However, with the number of employees down by almost 10 million, the rate of union membership was up by 0.5 percentage points, reaching 10.8%. The union membership rate falls to 6.3% when the public sector is excluded, however. The report also indicates that, for the first time, the number of union members among private sector employees has been surpassed by the number of union members in the public sector, where the number of staff has remained stable: 7.2 million union members employed in the public sector, compared to 7.1 million employed in the private sector (on the previous statistics that indicated this trend, see article n°7217). Meanwhile the number of employees represented by a union (which includes employees who are not union members but are covered by a company collective agreement negotiated by a union) has fallen by almost 500,000 to 15.9 million. However the percentage of employees covered by such an agreement has increased by 0.5 percentage points, reaching 12.1%, for the same reason as the increase in the rate of union membership: the decrease in the number of employees. Although the BLS calls for a cautious interpretation of this data, it finds union members had median weekly earnings of $1,144 in 2020, compared to $958 for employees who were not union members. In detail, the increase in the unionisation rate at the same time as massive job losses can be explained by the relative preservation of employment in the more unionised industries; transport and logistics (17.3% unionisation rate in 2019), construction (12.6%) and telecommunications (14.1%) have been among the industries to hold up well during the crisis. Conversely, the leisure and hospitality sector, which saw its number of employees fall from 13 to 10 million in 2020, had a rate of union membership of just 3% in 2019. The public report also gives details of how union members are spread out in the population: the rate of membership is higher among men (11% compared with 10.5% for women), higher among black people than white (12.3% compared with 10.7%) and one percentage point higher among workers aged 45 to 64 than among younger employees.