According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 14.3 million (10.8%) of US employees were in unions last year. That’s just over half of the 20.1% in 1983 when there were 17.7 million employed, waged, and salaried workers in unions. The number of union members declined 321,000 between 2019 to 2020; however the percentage of unionized employees increased by half a percentage point. This suggests most pandemic job losses were in non-union jobs. While there are strong indications workers may need union representation in the current work environment, the recent defeat of unionization efforts at Amazon’s warehouse in Alabama in April was discouraging to the advocates of organized labor. Another discouraging statistic in the US BLS was the difference between younger and older workers in union membership. In 2020, 13% of workers 45 to 54 years of age were union members (private and public) compared to 9.8% of workers 25 to 34 years old.
Nationwide, union members accounted for 10.8 percent of employed wage and salary workers in 2020, up 0.5 percentage point from 2019. Since 1989, when comparable state data became available, union membership rates in Michigan have been above the U.S. average. Michigan had 604,000 union members in 2020.