Media-fueled imagery of assembly-line workers and guys in hard hats, alongside breathless national stories about local organizing drives, contribute to a perception of U.S. labor unions that is not in line with reality. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual union membership report on Tuesday, so it’s a good time to refresh our knowledge of the facts about organized labor in the United States.
These facts are separate from any political concerns about how unions use their influence to push progressive views and elect Democrats (which they do). Here’s where unions are today:
- The union membership rate, which the BLS defines as the percentage of wage and salaried workers who are union members, dropped from 10 percent in 2023 to 9.9 percent in 2024. It’s in single digits for the first time since this survey began, in 1983, when the membership rate was 20.1 percent.
- The private sector union membership rate is 5.9 percent, down from 6 percent in 2023.
- The public sector union membership rate is 32.2 percent.
- The total number of workers who are union members is 14.3 million.
- Of those, 7 million are public sector workers, so roughly half of U.S. union members work for the government.
- The National Education Association reported to the Department of Labor that it had 2.8 million members in 2024. The American Federation of Teachers reported 1.8 million members. That means 32 percent of all U.S. union members are in the two major teachers’ unions.
- The union membership rates for men and women are roughly the same: 10.2 percent for men and 9.5 percent for women.
- By age and sex, the most unionized group of workers in the U.S. is women between the ages of 45 and 54, with a union membership rate of 13 percent.
- The vast majority of workers in “blue-collar,” male-dominated industries are not union members:
- 93.4 percent of mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction workers are not union members.
- 92.2 percent of manufacturing workers are not union members.
- 89.7 percent of construction workers are not union members.
- 84.2 percent of transportation and warehousing workers are not union members.
- Even in protective services occupations, which is the second-most-unionized occupational grouping in the country and includes police and fire, 70.4 percent of workers are not union members.
- The occupational group with the highest union membership rate is education, training, and library, at 32.3 percent.
- In the public sector, the union membership rate is highest at the local level of government (38.2 percent), followed by state (27.9 percent) and federal (25.3 percent).
- Almost 30 percent of all U.S. union members live in California or New York, despite those two states’ only having 17 percent of the country’s workers.
- The only states with union membership rates higher than 20 percent are Hawaii (26.5 percent) and New York (20.6 percent).
- More states (30) have union membership rates below the national average than above it.
- The lowest union membership rates are in North Carolina (2.4 percent), South Dakota (2.7 percent), and South Carolina (2.8 percent). The Carolinas do not allow public sector collective bargaining.