What the new numbers on union membership say about the state of organized labor

Even after another year of headline-grabbing union efforts and labor activism, the rate of union membership in the United States fell once again, according to new numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)—but the total number of workers who are members of unions actually increased. Those seemingly disparate statistics point to the tricky math required to understand the current state of the labor movement.

The percentage of total workers who are union members dropped to 10.1% in 2022—down from 10.3% in 2021, and the lowest union rate on record, per the BLS. In 1983, for example, the first year available for comparable data, the rate of union membership in the U.S. was 20.1%.

But the total numbers of workers who belong to a union increased by 1.9%, or 273,000 people, in 2022. That may not seem as drastic as labor efforts throughout the year might have had us expect, but to Seth Harris, a Northeastern University professor who was a top labor advisor to President Joe Biden and Acting Labor Secretary under President Barack Obama, any growth is good news for the labor movement. “The union membership numbers grew overall, and in each of the public and private sectors, even though the union density rate overall and in both sectors fell,” he explained over email. “The rate fell because of the huge increase in employment in the U.S.”

While the number of workers belonging to a union increased to a total of 14.3 million, the number of workers overall grew by a staggering 5.3 million. “This disproportionately large increase in the number of total wage and salary employment compared with the increase in the number of union members led to a decrease in the union membership rate,” the BLS wrote in its news release. Nonunion jobs grew faster than those covered by unions.

Still, union density has been on a nearly-steady decline since the 1940s, with the exception of a few standout years (1999 and 2007, in particular, saw notable membership growth), says Kate Bronfenbrenner, a senior lecturer at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and codirector of the Worker Empowerment Research Project. In 2020, the union membership rate was 10.8%, a slight uptick from the year prior (10.3%), though that increase was also due to larger workforce factors because the total number of nonunion workers saw a disproportionately large decline during the first year of the pandemic.

According to an estimate from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), more than 60 million workers who wanted to join a union could not, which speaks to the ways employers “exploit our weak and outdated labor laws to stop union organizing,” EPI president Heidi Shierholz wrote online. (Multiple employers were found by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to have violated labor laws in 2022, including Starbucks for refusing to negotiate and withholding pay and benefits from unionized stores. Labor advocates often note that the penalties for violating such labor laws are so minor that they’re often not an effective deterrent.)

Some union experts and labor advocates may be a bit disappointed by the BLS numbers, but they’re also optimistic that labor actions will continue. “Organizing victories are happening in every industry, public and private, and every sector of our economy all across the country.” AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler wrote on Twitter. “This wave of organizing will continue to gather steam in 2023 [and] beyond.”

The BLS report may not have the capacity to capture the full impact of the labor movement just yet, either. Not all workers who organized and held union elections in 2022 have yet negotiated a contract, and when asked how those workers fit into the BLS report, both Harris and Bronfenbrenner admitted it’s not clear. “This is a survey, and the survey asks, ‘Are you a union member?’” Bronfenbrenner says.

With a majority of the union organizing that happened last year currently being challenged by employers, still in first contract negotiations, or heading to the courts, she adds that it’s not clear how those workers answer that question. “I would project that the majority of those workers—where the elections were contested, they don’t have a first contract, they’re yet to be paying dues, so they’re technically not union members—are going to answer no to the question, even though they won a major union victory,” she adds. Harris noted the same, that he can’t say whether “the workers at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse or the 300-ish organized [at] Starbucks answered yes to that question because they signed an authorization card, or if they concluded the answer is no because they don’t have a contract.” His guess, he added, is a little of both—which could leave many new workers who recently organized uncounted.

That union membership grew even as density declined is still a positive to Harris. The success of all of 2022’s notable worker organizing—at Starbucks, Amazon, and more—won’t be visible right away, and likely not “fully understood until deep into 2023,” he wrote in a post for Northeastern’s Power At Work blog. But other statistics speak to the labor movement’s growth, like the fact that the number of union-election petitions filed with the NLRB increased by more than 50% in 2022, or that 71% of Americans approved of labor unions in 2022, the highest public support since 1965.

Still, the report may be a wake-up call to unions and how much more effort they need to make to put a dent into the overall workforce. “I won’t discount the fact that we had growth in the number of union members,” Bronfenbrenner says. “We haven’t had that for a while, so that’s laying the groundwork for more power.” But if unions want to really increase union density in the workforce, she adds, “they have to organize hundreds of millions of workers—not 1 million, not 2 million, but hundreds of millions. To do that takes organizing on scale, takes using their power to pressure employers to back off these anti-union campaigns . . . and being more creative and aggressive.”