2020 15.8%
2010 17.8%
2000 20.9%
PPI President Will Marshall, writing in 2007 for the online journal Democratic Strategist, imagines some new directions for American labor unions after 25 years of falling membership:
“[New-model unions] could help workers acquire valuable marketable skills and create “virtual hiring halls” to match them to employers. They could also provide services like portable pensions and health insurance, which would smooth workers’ transitions from job to job. And they could experiment with novel concepts like wage or mortgage insurance, which aim at keeping families’ living standards from collapsing when workers lose their jobs. … Modern labor associations could help workers bargain with their employers for a better work-family balance — for flextime, paid leave, telecommuting and part-time jobs with decent benefits. They could operate, in short, like a back-to-the-future update on the old craft unions, which were defenders of quality workmanship as well as workers’ interests.”
Appealing though this vision may have been (and still might be), no such large-scale transition took place. Instead the trends of the ensuing 15 years looked about the same as those of the previous quarter-century. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ first systematic survey of union membership in 1983* had reported 11.9 million private-sector workers enrolled in unions, which was 19% of that year’s 92 million private-sector workers. A decade later, in 1993, BLS found 9.6 million union members among 85.5 million private sector workers (11.2%). The 2003 release then reported 8.5 million or 8.2% of 102.6 million; the 2010 and 2015 releases, a sharp financial crisis drop to 7.1 million of 103 million workers (6.9%) and then a recovery to 7.6 million of 113.1 million (6.7%) by 2015. The COVID pandemic brought another drop, to 7.03 million of 115.8 million private-sector workers (6.1%) in 2021. And last Thursday’s release brought the figures to 2022, with a modest rebound in total enrollment to 7.2 million private-sector union members, or 6.0% of their 120.4 million private-sector worker total. This is the lowest share noted in the BLS release archives and possibly (though not certainly, since data collection methods have changed) the lowest since the 1890s. Looking at “industrial sectors” rather than economy-wide totals, alternatively, since 1983 unionization rates have fallen from 28% to 7.8% in manufacturing, from 40% to 14.5% in transport, and from 41% to 8% in telecommunications.
How does this experience look in an international context? Is the U.S. different, or do American trends resemble those elsewhere? In one sense, labor laws differ widely and overall U.S. union membership rates are below the figures the OECD reports for most European countries. Trends over time, though, look pretty similar. The OECD’s statistics, which cover 37 upper- and middle-income country members, show an overall drop in union membership from 20.9% of workers (combining government and private-sector workers) in 2000 to 15.8% as of 2020. I.e., a decline slightly slower than the one the BLS reports in the United States, but not a fundamentally different trend. Among individual countries, OECD figures show unionization rates dropping from 24.6% to 16.3% in Germany from 2000 to 2021; from 24.9% to 13.7% in Australia; 23.5% to 13.4% in Poland; 21.5% to 16.8% in Japan; 29.8% to 23.5% in the U.K.; and from 16.5% to 12.5% in Spain. OECD’s Latin American members are a bit of an exception, with sharply different trends by country: stable at about 11% in Chile, up from 14% to 20% in Costa Rica, down from 16.5% to 12.4% in Mexico and also down from 12.5% to 9.5% in Colombia.
The similarity across countries suggests that BLS’ annual U.S. releases are picking up something general about work in upper- and middle-income countries. Perhaps, as Marshall was suggesting 16 years ago, this reflects a broad shift away from long careers in single companies and seniority-based promotion, and consequently an erosion of the appeal of traditional collective bargaining-based unionization among workers.
The big exception is in Europe’s far north. Scandinavian unionization rates, though also dropping a bit since 2000, are vastly above those in other countries. Unions continue to enroll more than 60% of workers in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, are barely lower at 59% in Norway, and are a startling 91% in Iceland. The difference may reflect different approaches. Though Scandinavian unions are obviously concerned with contracts and retirement benefits, they appear to give more weight than unions elsewhere to career service and support policies such as skill development programs, financial support during periods of unemployment, and job placement services enabling workers to move to find new or higher-paying jobs. To some extent this approach recalls Marshall’s ideas 16 years back, suggesting that while they may not have taken root back then, they likely still carry value.
* One partial exception, linked below, is a 1985 report with some figures drawn 1980 survey (14 million union members among 71.4 million private-sector workers, or 20% of the total, though this probably isn’t strictly comparable to the post-1983 reports), and still higher figures from earlier decades though these are definitely not directly comparable.
** Trends in public employee unions are quite different: steady growth from 5.7 million in 1983 to a peak of nearly 8 million in 2012, followed by a drop back to 7.1 million as of 2022.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual report on union membership, trends in different industries, wage rates for members and non-members, age and sex, etc, in 2022.
And PPI’s Will Marshall on a new model and possible path forward for unions in 2007.
More Data:
BLS for some reason hasn’t posted its 1980s releases, but does have the data from 1992 forward. BLS’ unionization archives.
… and the 1985 BLS report noted above with some early-1980s figures and comparisons as far back as 1945.
Also, a database maintained by Trinity College & Georgia State academics reprints data back to 1973 (though the 1973-1982 figures come from a different survey and aren’t strictly comparable to those of 1983 and afterward).
Points of Comparison:
OECD tracks its 37 members.
The International Labor Organization has a table of recent union membership rates in 129 countries. Iceland is on top with 91% of about 195,000 Icelandic workers, and Venezuela at the bottom with 0.2%. Data collection probably isn’t consistent across countries though, so the figures likely aren’t totally comparable.
And the International Trade Union Congress, an international association of 163 union federations representing 200 million workers in 163 countries.
Points of Comparison (2):
The Canadian experience at first seems a sharp contrast to that of the United States, with unionization rates stable at about 29% or 28% of workers since 2000. The apparent stability conceals a very sharp public/private divergence though, with 70% of Canadian government workers in unions as against a falling 13% of private-sector workers.
World’s most successful union federation? The 14 members of Sweden’s Landsorganisationen i Sverige, despite their federation’s dismaying domain name (www.lo.se), enroll 1.5 million of Sweden’s 5.1 million workers.
Korea’s Trade Union Confederation.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions.
Costa Rica’s Confederación de Trabajadores Rerum Novarum.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank Progressive Economy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
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