The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has just released its 2019 union membership and collective bargaining coverage report. And the news isn’t great. Unfortunately, the uptick in strike action that swept the country in 2018 and 2019 is not translating into a recovery of union organization, at least not yet.

The general trend continues to be downward in both the public and private sectors, though it looks like the Janus v. AFSCME decision, which imposed an open-shop regime on the entire public sector nationwide, hasn’t had the catastrophic impact on public sector density that many feared it would. Overall union density now stands at 10.3%, private sector density at 6.2%, and public sector density at 33.6%. Another year, another round of media reports on how union membership has fallen to all-time lows.

Union density and formal collective bargaining rights aren’t everything. Education workers in particular have used strike action to win big victories in low-density states where public employees lack the right to bargain collectively. But these are some of the clearest indicators of working-class power we have, and their steady decline does not bode well for either popular living standards or the health of political democracy.