How many people in the US are members of a Union?

Question

Packinrat, thanks for the answer but I think you misread the question or I wrote it wrong somehow.
I'm talking about, Union members in the USA. Labor Unions, theres several different Unions though not just for labor.

thats great Sweetpea, have any idea how many people in the US are members of a Union?

Answer 1

According to the US Department of Labor, Union membership was 12% in 2006 dropping from 12.5% in 2005 (both wage & salary workers). That's down from 20.1% in 1983 - the first year they were asking that question in their survey. A great deal of those people are government workers. I cannot find the statistic, but it has been steadily decreasing for decades. Basically these numbers are pretty useless; it does not show which industries are responsible for the decrease.

Something more informative would be a break down by type of work (blue vs white collar), by industry, and by the number of people working in each sector.

Traditionally, white collar occupations have less pressing needs for unionization; they have more flexibility in jobs - if the current employer is rotten, easier to get a different job. Their physical Safety is usually less of a concern - there are only so many hazards in an office setting. Blue collar workers, however, tend to be limited by either education, financial resources, or have specialized in a trade that limits the number of companies that hire that skill set. Blue collar workers are usually in a great deal more physical danger at work. Physical Labor = Physical Danger. (If you don't think so, trade the MSDS for your job and that of an Industrial Construction worker. Or, the safety training/standards - are OSHA certs and daily safety meetings required at your job?)

This also does not show the millions of workers who are represented by a Union even if they are not themselves members. In 2006, that number was 1.5 million. (If that confuses you, see the article about Duty of Fair Representation).

The DOL Annual Statistics Report has link for "Access to Historical data for the tables of the Union affiliation data from the Current Population Survey" Table 3; this little data mining challenge is MUCH more informative. If you play around with it, there is even an option to show you the graphs. It breaks it all down fairly well. It does lump things together that skews the data; for instance the types of construction. Residential (the people who built your house) are counted in the same category as Industrial (the people building power plants & refineries). Residential tends to be less unionized and there are far more of them than Industrial which is heavily unionized.

And of course, this is all based on a survey (see technical note in report). Therefore, it's a statistical guess at the real information. The results are at a 90% confidence interval that the the sampling data will differ no more than 1.6 standard errors from the "true" population values. All and all, that's not bad for a data sample considering how poor the CI and CE is for typical polling.

Answer 2

I don't remember exactly, but the number of union members is on the order of 12 to 14% of the labor force today... that's the lowest that it has been in like forever.... But I don't think that it was ever higher than 35 to 40% at it's peak....

Answer 3

Well, according to the link packinrat posted, where he left off the US number, it's 12.4%, or about 1 in 8 workers. But that's heavily weighted with government employees or others in the public sector, where almost 3 in 8 are union. Amongst private employers, it's about 1 in 13 or 14.

Answer 4

I contacted the federal government statistics office since I heard someone on the Rush Limbaugh program (who was sitting in for Rush) complaining about the Unions several weeks ago. The stats that I was given by the government were from a "survey" of a few thousand people, and you know how undependable surveys are. Seems the government does NOT have good statistics on how many Union members there are in the US. I was disappointed.

Answer 5

The work force is an estimated 145 million. Union membership is estimated at 8%. More than half are government employees.

Answer 6

No, I grew up in a Union town and though observation, I decided that unions were not very profitable to a company and in fact they were generally the opposite. I've always made well above my union counter parts.

Answer 7

I was up until a few months ago. I was a steward and was on the negotiation team for the last contract.

The Union sucked though. It held talented workers back from getting paid according to their value.

Some unions do good for workers, others hold them back.

Answer 8

I don't know the exact numbers but I am

Answer 9

not many and that is the problem - people are not organized they are isolated and used as pawns.

Answer 10

Too many
Austria ........................................... 2002 18.2 0.0 118.2 – –
Belgium ......................................... 2002 41.7 12.9 18.2 10.6 0.2
Denmark ....................................... 2003 20.4 .0 14.2 5.9 .3
Finland .......................................... 2003 29.7 .0 11.5 8.2 1, 210.0
France ........................................... 2003 33.0 13.0 20.0 – –
Germany ....................................... 2003 19.8 .0 119.8 – .0
Ireland ........................................... 2003 8.0 – 18.0 – –
Italy ............................................... 2004 53.1 3.1 48.0 .7 1.3
Netherlands .................................. 2003 20.1 .0 119.8 – .3
Norway .......................................... 2002 26.0 .0 124.0 – 2.0
Spain ............................................. 2003 6.0 . . 4.5 1.5 –
Sweden ......................................... 2003 20.7 .0 14.7 5.6 .4
Switzerland ................................... 2001 13.0 .0 13.0 .0 .0
United Kingdom ............................ 2003 12.8 .0 110.0 – 2.8
......................................................
Average ......................................... 24.2 17.2

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