The total number of union members also took an unusually big drop, by 400,000, to 14.366 million, even though overall employment in the United States rose by 2.4 million nationwide last year, the B.L.S. said.
The declines came during a period when the nation’s labor unions have been on the defensive. Wisconsin enacted a law in 2011 that curbed the collective bargaining rights of most of the state’s government employees, while Indiana and Michigan passed “right to work” laws last year that are likely to encourage more private-sector workers to drop their union membership so they do not have to pay any union dues or fees.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said union membership for private-sector workers dropped to 6.6 last year, from 6.9 percent in 2011 – a drop that has caused some labor leaders to voice fears that unions are steadily fading into irrelevance for many large employers.
The bureau said union membership among public-sector employees fell to 35.9 percent in 2012, from 37.0 percent the previous year, and there were more union members in the public sector — 7.3 million employees – than in the private sector, 7 million.
The number of union members is down from 17.7 million in 1983, when 20.1 percent of the nation’s workers belonged to labor unions.
In recent months, however, there has been an uptick in union activity, as evidenced by labor protests at Walmart stores across the nation in November and one-day strike by fast food workers in New York City last month. In both those job actions, the workers were protesting what they said were low wages and meager benefits. But union officials acknowledge that it is often hard, in the face of intense employer resistance and employee fears of layoffs, to persuade a majority of workers at a big-box store or other workplaces to vote to unionize.
Richard Trumka, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the nation’s main union federation, responded to the labor report in a statement, saying, “Working women and men urgently need a voice on the job today, but the sad truth is that it has become more difficult for them to have one, as today’s figures on union membership demonstrate.”
Among individual states, North Carolina had the lowest unionization rate, 2.9 percent, the B.L.S. report said, followed by Arkansas at 3.2 percent and South Carolina at 3.3 percent. New York had the highest unionization rate, 23.2 percent, followed by Alaska at 22.4 percent and Hawaii at 21.6 percent.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/business/union-membership-drops-despite-job-growth.html?partner=rss&emc=rss