It’s A Record Low
Union membership in the United States is now at a record low level. The percentage of U.S. workers who belong to a union dropped from 10.3 percent to 10.1 percent…this is according to numbers released yesterday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The job market is adding non-unionized workers at a faster rate than unionized workers, and the 10.1 percent union level is the lowest since the government starting tracking such things some 40 years ago.
Analysts note that this decline comes despite the highest union approval rate in decades—Gallup reported last year that 71 percent of Americans approve of labor unions. In addition, the Biden Administration is the most “pro-union” administration in memory; remember that the president does not ever refer to jobs until he calls them “good union jobs”.
By the way, while 71 percent of Americans overall approved of unions in that survey, 58 percent of non-unionized workers say they are not interested at all in joining a union.
This matters to the overall economy because unionized workers typically are paid more…which may be fine for them, but perhaps not for the businesses producing items, or for the consumers who pay more because of the higher labor cost.
Predictably, union officials blame what they term “union-busting firms” for the slide and assert that there is a “wave of organizing” that will “continue to gather steam in 2023 and beyond despite broken labor laws that rig the system against workers.”
Easy to blame someone else, but the fact is that while unions may have been necessary in certain industries at one time, their relevance within the workforce has diminished steadily over time, in many cases due to overreach—and with that, their political influence has similarly dropped.
