Who Is Big Labor, Anyway?

There are three persistent, widespread myths about union members. First, many believe that organized labor speaks for wage- and salary-earners as a class based on overwhelming membership. Second, many believe that union members work in private industries, usually in traditional “industrial” occupations like manufacturing. Third, many believe that unionized workers are largely male, making organized labor a vehicle for improving or maintaining the status of non-college-educated men.

None of those things are true. This year’s Bureau of Labor Statistics estimations of union membership debunk each myth. First, they show union density (the proportion of the workforce that is unionized) hitting a post–World War II low (again), with the rate falling below 10 percent in the civilian workforce and below 6 percent in the private sector. Second, they show that the most-unionized occupational classes are government-based: “Education, training, and library occupations” is the most-unionized class, at 32.3 percent, with “Protective service occupations” second at 29.6 percent. And union members are only very slightly more male relative to men’s share of the overall workforce than female, with 53.5 percent of union members and 51.75 percent of all employed workers being men.

Unions Don’t Speak for Most Workers

The Long Decline in union membership is nothing new. Organized labor reached its apogee in the 1950s, and the Long Decline was politically and economically noticeable by the 1970s.

Nothing has changed. For 2024, the BLS data show union density at another modern-era low, falling to 9.9 percent. For private-sector workers, the proportion is even lower, at only 5.9 percent. Total union membership declined from 14.42 million to 14.26 million.

This is disappointing for left-wing journalists who eagerly regurgitate labor-union press releases touting ever-victorious union organizing campaigns. (Well, ever-victorious campaigns unless some unspecified nefarious employer interference occurs, as Big Labor can never fail, it can only be failed.) Dominic Pino, a finance and economics writer for National Review, has made an annual tradition of juxtaposing media headlines touting a Big Labor surge with the annual government data showing no such thing.

But journalists aren’t the only group that should rethink their assumptions as the data continue to show that organized labor speaks for a decreasing share of actual workers. Some Republican politicians have proposed resurrecting the long-dead policies of former President Barack Obama to make sure Big Labor cannot be failed again in the name of the American worker. Given how little interest there actually is in union formation, they should reconsider.

Union Members Disproportionately Work for the Government

According to the BLS estimates, just over 144.5 million people were employed in the United States in 2024. Of them, 122.7 million worked in the private sector, and 21.8 million were employed in government service at either the state, local, or federal level, meaning that 84.8 percent of American civilian workers worked in the private sector.

Union members do not share this industry pattern. The BLS estimated that 7.2 million private-sector workers, 5.9 percent of private-sector workers, were union members while 7.0 million were government workers, for a sector union density exceeding 32 percent. That means that nearly half—49.3 percent—of union members are government workers.

It is not a coincidence that Big Labor shifted politically from the mainstream of the Democratic Party toward the socialist Left when the AFL-CIO was taken over by a faction representing ascendant government-worker unions in 1995. Where previously private-sector economic realities held labor officials’ left-wing ids in check, government worker unions that can (and do) “elect their bosses” have nothing holding them back from releasing unconstrained Everything Leftism.

Look Elsewhere to Support Non-College Men

The Current American Plurality that elected the present federal government is deeply interested in advancing the interests of men without college degrees. This is because many of them are men without college degrees: Exit pollsters broke down white voters without degrees by sex and found 69 percent of white men without a degree voted Republican compared with 57 percent of white voters overall. This has made policy entrepreneurs interested in serving (and perhaps one day leading) the Current American Plurality, especially susceptible to the special-interest politics of Teamsters Union boss Sean O’Brien and other, less Everything Leftist union bosses who offer strengthening Big Labor as a way to help that group.

But there’s a problem with that, and readers who have made it this far can probably already guess the problem from the information already presented. Labor union members are not much more male than the workforce as a whole, and other data show that they tend to be better educated. The BLS reports that men’s unionization rate is 0.7 percentage points higher than women. That ends up meaning that while 51.75 percent of the workforce is male, 53.5 percent of union members are—not a huge difference.

This is a change from the past and is beginning to show up in the ranks of union bosses whom then-SEIU head Andy Stern once called “pale, male, and stale.” (Stern himself was a pale male who rapidly became stale as his split from the AFL-CIO failed to pay off.) Arguably, the four most prominent union presidents in today’s labor movement are women: Liz Shuler of the AFL-CIO, April Verrett of the SEIU, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, and Becky Pringle of the National Education Association. The age-sex classification most likely to be unionized in the BLS data was women between the ages of 45 and 54.

And while BLS does not publish estimates on education, the Union Membership and Coverage Database compiled by Barry T. Hirsch, David A. Macpherson, and William E. Even does. Those estimates show that, contrary to Big Labor’s hard-hat-and-factory-line image, union members have a greater proportion of bachelor’s degrees than the civilian workforce as a whole. According to the data set, in 2023 (the most recent year published as of writing) among workers without bachelor’s degrees, 9.1 percent were unionized. Among degree holders, the proportion was 11.2 percent. While approximately 41 percent of the workforce have a degree, 46 percent of union members do.

This makes sense considering other data; the workers in “Education, training, and library occupations” that is the most unionized occupational class are likely to be degree holders (and disproportionally female relative to the broader population). Policy entrepreneurs courting and being courted by unions should know that the traditional manual jobs they seek to expand are not necessarily highly unionized: The BLS reports that manufacturing and mining and resource extraction have unionization rates lower than the national average.

Lessons

If the Current American Plurality wants to hold together, it will need to find ways to support workers as a whole, not cheaply chase the union members that BLS and other data reveal to be unripe for recruitment by throwing more traditional members of the coalition under the bus. The Taft-Hartley Consensus approach to labor relations, which Republicans have advanced for 80 years, offers the opportunity for those workers who freely choose to organize unions to continue to do so while protecting the rights of workers who choose not to form unions or choose to work independently. It should not be cheaply abandoned in service to myths about whom the conservative movement is seeking to court.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/who-is-big-labor-anyway/