At the end of January, the Department of Labor released its annual Union Members Summary, which revealed that union membership in the United States has held at about 12% over the last few years. This population is considerably smaller than the roughly 20% of American workers who were unionized in 1983 when the Department of Labor began tracking such statistics.
While the overall decrease is more than enough cause for concern for labor rights advocates, what strikes me as even more alarming is that certain types of workers, namely private industry workers, who are incredibly likely to be taken advantage of, are unionizing at an abysmally lower rate than their public-sector counterparts.
According to the Union Members Summary, the union membership rate for private sector employees is around 7.5% but is almost 36% for those working in the public sector. What has contributed to this reduction? Working Life, a publication by the Labor Research Association, has attributed this drop in part to ”ongoing layoffs” and the “anti-union posture of the Bush administration.”
