From the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Union Members Summary
Internet address: stats.bls.gov
Technical information: (202) 691-6378 USDL 00-16
For release: 10:00 A.M. EST
Media contact: 691-5902 Wednesday, January 19, 2000
UNION MEMBERS IN 1999
In 1999, the share of wage and salary workers who were members of unions
was 13.9 percent, essentially unchanged from the prior year, the U.S.
Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The
number of union members was 16.5 million in 1999, up slightly from 1998.
Some highlights from the 1999 data are:
--Government workers were four times as likely to be union members as
were their private sector counterparts.
--Local government workers, a group that includes police officers and
firefighters, had the highest unionization rate in the public sector.
--A little over one-fifth of employed black men were members of unions--
the highest unionization rate across the major demographic groups.
Membership by Industry and Occupation
In 1999, government workers continued to have a substantially higher
unionization rate (37.3 percent) than workers in the private sector
(9.4 percent). Within the public sector, local government workers had the
highest unionization rate, at 42.9 percent. Among the private nonagricultural
industries, the highest unionization rate occurred in transportation and
public utilities (25.5 percent). Unionization rates in manufacturing
(15.6 percent) and in construction (19.1 percent) were higher than the average
as well. The unionization rate in maufacturing continued to decline in 1999.
The nonagricultural industry with the lowest unionization rate in 1999 was
finance, insurance, and real estate (2.1 percent). (See table 3.)
Among the occupational groups, protective service continued to have the
highest unionization rate, at 38.2 percent. Other occupational groups with
higher-than-average unionization rates were professional specialty workers
(19.7 percent); precision production, craft, and repair workers
(22.4 percent); and operators, fabricators, and laborers (20.7 percent),
many of whom work in the manufacturing industry. The unionization rate
was lowest in sales occupations (4.1 percent). (See table 3.)
Demographic Characteristics of Union Members
Union membership continued to be higher among men (16.1 percent) than
women (11.4 percent). The gap in unionization rates between the sexes has
been closing; in 1983 the rate for men was 24.7 percent and the rate for
women was 14.6 percent.
Blacks continued to have higher unionization rates (17.2 percent) than
whites (13.5 percent) and Hispanics (11.9 percent). Among the major worker
groups, black men continued to have the highest union membership rate
(20.5 percent), while white and Hispanic women continued to have the lowest
rates (10.9 and 10.4 percent, respectively). Workers ages 35 to 64 were more
likely to be union members than their younger counterparts. Full-time workers
were more than twice as likely as part-time workers to be union members.
(See table 1.)
- 2 -
Union Representation of Nonmembers
About 1.7 million wage and salary workers were represented at their
work place by a union in 1999, but were not union members themselves.
(See table 1.) A little more than half of these workers were employed
in government. (See table 3.)
Earnings
In 1999, union members had median usual weekly earnings of $672,
compared with a median of $516 for wage and salary workers who were not
represented by unions. (See table 2.) The difference reflects a variety
of influences in addition to coverage by a collective bargaining agreement,
including variations in the distributions of union members and non-union
employees by occupation, industry, firm size, or geographic region. (For a
discussion of the problem of differentiating between the influence of union
status and the influence of other worker characteristics on employee
earnings, see Kay E. Anderson, Philip M. Doyle, and Albert E. Schwenk,
"Measuring Union-Nonunion Earnings Differences," Monthly Labor Review, June
1990, pp. 26-38.)
Bureau of Labor Statistics
cpsinfo@bls.gov
Last modified: Thursday, January 27, 2000
URL: /news.release/union2.nr0.htm
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