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Nation's union membership sees rare, slight jump

Date Posted: February 8 2008

The nation's labor movement received a glimmer of good news on Jan. 25, as the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that union membership experienced a rare increase in membership in 2007.

It wasn't much of a hike: there were 15.7 million union members in the U.S. in 2007 - 311,000 more than in 2006. That translates into unions representing 12.1 percent of workers last year, vs. 12.0 percent in 2006.

The increase is so small that the BLS said the union numbers are "essentially unchanged." But, in three of the last four years, organized labor has arrested a steady year-to-year drop in the nation's union members. Union penetration was flat in both 2004 and 2005 at 12.5 percent.

Contrast today's numbers with those from 1983, when 20 percent of workers in the U.S. belonged to a union.

"I don't think the number means we've turned the corner," said Tom Woodruff, executive vice president in charge of organizing at the Service Employees International Union, to the Washington Post. "I think it's significant the labor movement is growing. But it's not nearly enough."

In Michigan, the trend moved in the other direction. Led by employment losses in the auto industry, our state now has 879,000 union members - a loss of 23,000, or 2.6 percent, from 2006. In fellow rust-belt state Illinois, union rolls dropped by 89,000 workers, or 1.9 percent.

Michigan (19.5 percent) still has the fifth highest union workforce penetration in the nation, behind New York (25.2 percent) Alaska (23.8 percent); Hawaii (23.4 percent) and Washington (20.2 percent).

The BLS reported that North Carolina posted the nation's lowest unionization rate (3.0 percent), followed by Virginia (3.7 percent), South Carolina (4.1 percent), Georgia (4.4 percent), and Texas (4.7 percent).

BLS said 7.5% of private-sector workers (up 0.1 percent from 2006) were union members last year, compared to 35.9% of public-sector workers. The most-unionized occupations were in education, training and libraries (37.2%) and protective services - fire fighters, police and their colleagues - at 35.2%.
In the U.S. construction industry, the unionized sector represented 1.2 million workers, or 13.9 percent of the workforce in 2007 (up from 13.6 percent in 2006).

*Some other trends in the numbers: beside construction, unionization among U.S. health care workers was another growth area in 2007, up 1 percent to 13.5 percent.

*The number of unionized factory workers in the U.S. declined from 1.82 million (11.7% of all factory workers) to 1.73 million (11.3%).

The union worker's median weekly wage last year hit a significant milestone: it is exactly $200 per week ahead of the nonunion worker's median wage: $863-$663. The gap became a chasm in the construction industry: ($1,000-$624).

(From Press Associates and the Bureau of Labor Statistics).