Union members now government majority

Bureau of Labor Statistics

Evidence from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revealed at the end of last week that, for the first time in American history, the majority of union members are government workers rather than private-sector employees.

According to the bureau's annual report on union membership, the longstanding notion that union members are overwhelmingly blue-collar factory workers is now a thing of the past.
 
Public vs. Private

In fact, according to a report in the New York Times, membership fell so fast in the private sector last year that the 7.9 million unionized public-sector workers easily outnumbered those in the private sector.

Randel K. Johnson, Senior Vice President for Labor at the US Chamber of Commerce told the US paper, "There has been steady growth among union members in the public sector, but I'm a little bit shocked to see that the lines have actually crossed." Actually, according to BLS statistics, 7.2 percent of private-sector workers were union members last year, down from 7.6 percent the previous year. That, labor historians said, was the lowest percentage of private-sector workers in unions since 1900. Among government workers, union membership grew to 37.4 percent last year, from 36.8 percent in 2008.

Membership

The recession is largely to blame. After rising the two previous years, overall union membership had fallen by 771,000 in 2009 to 15.3 million, largely because employment declined over all. Analysts say the rate of private-sector unionization fell because two sectors where unions are especially strong - the manufacturing and construction industries - suffered especially large job losses because of the economic crisis.

However, according to the BLS, average weekly earnings for full-time unionized workers were $908 last year, compared with $710 for workers not represented by unions. 

Fred Siegel, a visiting professor of history at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization, told the New York Times that, "There were enormous political ramifications" to the fact that public-sector workers are now the majority in organized labor.

Several labor officials and scholars said private-sector workers could regain their majority in a year or two because of potential large-scale layoffs of government workers. But, when assessing the drop in private-sector unionization, Paula B. Voos, a labor relations professor at Rutgers, merely noted that it was a "sad commentary on the ability of private-sector workers to unionize."

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