Regular Carolina Journal contributor Lloyd Billingsley devotes a Daily Caller column to unions and their purported role in representing American workers.
Democrats are divided over President Obama’s new Trans-Pacific trade deal, but AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka doesn’t like it at all. “This agreement is not worthy of the American people and the American worker,” Trumka recently told Gwen Ifill of the PBS NewsHour. For their part, the American people and the American worker might question Mr. Trumka’s presumption to speak for them.
A full 93.4 percent of American workers in the private sector are not union members, according to the latest figures from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other words, the overwhelming majority of American workers in the private sector, nearly all of them, are not union members.
According to the BLS, only 6.6 percent of workers in the private sector are members of unions, a small minority that is getting smaller.
A full 88.9 percent of all American workers, including public employees, are not union members, according to the BLS figures for 2014. In other words, the vast majority of American workers are not union members. Only 11.1 percent of workers are union members, a small minority, and that is only part of the story.
According to the BLS the 11.1 number is down 0.2 percent from the previous year. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the overall union membership rate was 20.1 percent, a major slide from 35 percent in the mid-1950s. So the overall decline has been continuous, but not in the government sector.
