It’s that time of year again when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases its annual report detailing, at least numerically, where unions stood in America in 2024. Notwithstanding many big labor headlines in recent years – the Starbucks campaign, the UAW strikes and favorable labor agreements at the Big 3, etc. – the 2024 data overall wasn’t good news for unions. Indeed, their numbers on a percentage basis of the American workforce have dropped, again, to historic lows.
According to the BLS press release: “The union membership rate – the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions – was 9.9 percent in 2024 [down from 10 percent in 2023], little changed from the prior year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.3 million, also showed little movement over the year. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union members.”
Some other key data points from the report include:
- Public sector union membership ticked down a bit to 32.2 percent (from 32.5 in 2023), but still far outpaces the percentage of private sector workers belonging to unions, which trickled down to 5.9 percent – the lowest percentage ever on record.
- The occupations seeing the highest unionization percentages were education, training, and library occupations (32.3 percent) and protective service occupations (29.6 percent).
- While the gender class has closed significantly in recent years, men (10.2 percent) continue to have a higher unionization rate than women (9.5 percent).
- Union density in states largely remains the same as in prior, recent years. Hawaii and New York had the highest union membership rates (26.5 percent and 20.6 percent, respectively), while the lowest rates were in North Carolina (2.4 percent), South Dakota (2.7 percent), and South Carolina (2.8 percent).
The continued decline in union numbers is noteworthy given recent legal developments that make it easier for unions to organize workplaces; the number of union election petitions in the last few years has skyrocketed, and union win rates at the ballot box have been astronomical on a percentage basis. Based on that, it doesn’t appear their numbers are poised to make a comeback anytime soon. We’ll see what 2025 brings.