Last year’s high-profile labor union gains did little to change the country’s union membership rate, according to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released Tuesday.
The percentage of wage and salary workers who are union members remained flat at 10%, or 14.4 million employees, in 2023.
The rate of public sector union membership (32.5%) was five times higher than for private sector workers (6%). The industries with the highest unionization rates worked in education, training, library and protective service occupations.
Men also had a slightly higher union participation rate (10.5%) than women (9.5%), as did Black workers. Workers aged 45 to 54 had the highest union membership (12.6%), compared with workers 16 to 24, who had the lowest (4.4%).
Hawaii (24.1%) and New York (20.6%) saw the highest rates of union membership. South Carolina (2.3%) and North Carolina (2.7%) had the lowest.
While the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the 2023 union participation rate is far lower than it was in 1983, when 20.1% of workers, or 17.7 million employees, were in unions, it noted that unions increased their membership by 139,000 in 2023 compared with a year earlier.
“It is important to acknowledge that public support for unions is the highest we have seen since the 1960s,” Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su said in a statement in response to the 2023 union participation statistics. “More than two thirds of wage and salary workers say they would consider joining a union.”
A Gallup poll last summer found that 67% of Americans approve of unions. It was the fifth straight year of union approval exceeding its long-term 62% average.
Last year saw several high-profile, high-impact strikes led by unions in various fields, including the United Auto Workers, the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild of America and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente unions — all of which saw significant wage gains as a result.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that nonunion workers made 86% of the weekly earnings of union workers.
