Lost jobs cause unionization rate to rise
Union members weathered the pandemic economic downturn better than other workers
Striking SEIU Healthcare Illinois workers walk a picket line outside the Lakeview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Chicago last month before their strike was settled. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
Union members were less likely to lose their jobs than other workers last year in the pandemic, resulting in a higher unionization rate.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released an annual union report Friday finding that unions lost about 320,000 jobs last year, down about 2.2 percent to 14.3 million across the country. But with 9.6 million wage or salary jobs lost across the workforce, a 6.7 percent downturn, the union membership rate actually rose to 10.8 percent, up a half percentage point from 2019.
“The disproportionately large decline in total wage and salary employment compared with the decline in the number of union members led to an increase in the union membership rate,” the bureau reported. But the longterm trends remained discouraging for the labor movement, as the bureau cited that “in 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers.”
That was reflected in an annual report on “The State of the Unions 2020” published in September, which found union membership has declined in Chicago and across the state over the last decade since the Great Recession, and the drop has been pronounced since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Janus case two years ago. At the same time, though, an annual Gallup poll found that public approval for unions was at its highest point since 2003, with almost two-thirds of citizens across the nation, 65 percent, in support of union labor.
The new U.S. bureau report found that the union membership rate of public-sector workers (34.8 percent) remained more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (6.3 percent), with the highest union membership in “protective service occupations (36.6 percent),” such as police and firefighters, “and in education, training, and library occupations (35.9 percent).”
Men continued to have a higher union membership rate than women (11-10.5 percent), but unionized women made more gains last year in the COVID economy. African Americans remained more likely to be union members than White, Asian, or Hispanic workers.
“Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 84 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($958 versus $1,144),” the new study reported, while “among states, Hawaii and New York continued to have the highest union membership rates (23.7 percent and 22 percent, respectively), while South Carolina and North Carolina continued to have the lowest (2.9 percent and 3.1 percent, respectively).”
With 700,000 union workers in Illinois, the state remained among seven that account for more than half of all union members across the nation. California, with 2.4 million union workers, and New York, with 1.7 million, were tops, while Pennsylvania also had 700,000 and Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio had 600,000 apiece.
“While it is disappointing to learn that Illinois was one of 28 states that experienced a decrease in union membership in 2020 — losing an estimated 32,000 union members — the state still boasts the third-largest labor movement in America, behind only California and New York,” said Frank Manzo IV of the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, one of the authors of “The State of the Unions” report. “It is important to understand that this year’s release continues to demonstrate that unions boost worker wages. Median weekly earnings per week are $186 higher for union members compared with nonunion workers, a difference that amounts to nearly $10,000 annually.
“Moreover, unions have the highest positive impacts on women and people of color,” he added. “The union wage premium reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is 24 percent for women compared with 16 percent for men. And while it is 19 percent for White workers, the union wage premium is 26 percent for Black and African American workers and 39 percent for Latinx and Hispanic workers.”
Manzo also cited that the union wage premium is positive for every single private sector industry except finance and insurance and professional and technical services. In the industries impacted most by the COVID-19 pandemic — health care and social assistance, leisure and hospitality, and accommodation and food services, educational services, construction, wholesale trade, and transportation and utilities — unions boost workers’ weekly earnings by between 14 and 36 percent.
University of Illinois Professor Robert Bruno, director of the Project for Middle Class Renewal and another co-author of the “State of the Unions” study, emphasized that more than the pandemic was at play last year. “Unionization rates are not just an expression of worker interest and support, and economic change,” he said. “They are also a product of political machinations. Policies that make unionization more difficult, legal rulings that restrict workers’ voice, and government rules that limit who is an employee do harm to workers ability to be collectively represented. The latest numbers reflect that America is a hard environment for workers to turn their working-class interests into collective bargaining power.”