Unions Held Their Own in 2017
And we're all better off because of it.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka at an OECD forum in 2016. OECD / Flickr
Unions had a pretty good year in 2017: they didn’t lose any ground.
According to the latest edition of the Bureau of Labor Statistics annual survey, released this morning, 10.7 percent of employed wage and salary workers were members of unions, unchanged from last year. There was a mild uptick in the share of private-sector workers represented by unions (aka union density), from 6.4 percent to 6.5 percent. Density was unchanged at 34.4 percent for public-sector workers — mildly surprising, given the war on labor being conducted by Republican governors and legislatures across the country.
As the graph below shows, 2017’s flatness is a bit of stability amid a long-term decline; we saw similarly unchanged density readings in 2013 and 2015. While the rate of decline has slowed from the rapid rates of the 1980s and 1990s, density for private-sector workers was down 1.0 percentage points from 2007 to 2017; for the public sector, it was down 1.5 points. Declining density is not new to the public sector — it peaked in 1994 at 38.7 percent, 4.3 points above last year’s reading — but the pace of slippage has accelerated over the last five years or so.