Study: U.S. Union Membership Rose in 2008
Buoyed by a rising tide in California in general and Southern
California in particular, U.S. unionization levels rose this year, defying a decades-long trend of decline, according to a
report by UCLA's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
"The
State of the Unions in 2008: A Profile of Union Membership in Los
Angeles, California and the Nation" shows unionization rates nationwide
rising half a percentage point over the 2007 level, to 12.6 percent of
all U.S. civilian workers in 2008. The rate rose one-tenth of a
percentage point between 2006 and 2007. Prior to that, the last time
U.S. unionization rates registered an increase was in 1979.
"This
is good news for organized labor," said Ruth Milkman, lead author of
the report and outgoing director of the UCLA labor institute. "It shows
that despite an extremely hostile environment, unions can grow."
Milkman
and UCLA sociology graduate student Bongoh Kye analyzed U.S. Current
Population Survey data on union membership for California, Los Angeles
and the nation. They report unionization rates by race, immigration
status, gender, age and education for the first six months of 2008.
This year's report and earlier such studies of unionization data going
back to 1996 are available at
www.irle.ucla.edu/research/unionmembership.html.
According to
the report, in the first half of 2008, the number of U.S. workers on
the membership rolls of labor unions increased by 583,300 over the 2007
average.
Fueling the nationwide increase was the recent
growth in unionization in California, which currently accounts for 16
percent of all the nation's union members, more than any other state.
California's unionization rate in 2008 is 17.8 percent, up from 16.7
percent in 2007 and 15.7 percent in 2006.
The Los Angeles
metro area, which includes Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange, Ventura and
Santa Barbara counties, helped drive California's union growth. Nearly
half of California's 2,633,600 union members -- or 1,227,600 workers --
live in the Los Angeles metro area, according to the UCLA study, which
is released annually on Labor Day. Despite being perceived historically
as anti-union, Los Angeles and its surrounding metro area have recently
seen increases in unionization rates, which rose to 17 percent in 2008
from 15.9 percent in 2007 and 15.2 percent in 2006.
"In a
very real way, Los Angeles and California continue to serve as strong
growth engines for organized labor nationally," said Milkman, a UCLA
professor of sociology. "The labor movement here is in much better
shape than in much of the rest of the country. If this year's
nationwide increase proves to be a lasting trend, historians will look
back and see the leading edge of that growth here in the West."
The
region's relatively high unionization rates are in keeping with its
high level of public-sector unionization, as well as the fact that the
sector in which unionization has declined most sharply nationally --
manufacturing -- has historically been less important to the region's
economy than was the case in other parts of the nation, the report
states.
While the public sector continues to
account for the largest share of unionized workers overall, the study
found an unexpected uptick in private-sector unionization in all three
geographical jurisdictions. Although the increase in the state and
nation was quite a bit smaller, Los Angeles' private-sector
unionization rate increased from 8.8 percent in 2007 to 10 percent
today.
"One component of this growth is recent union
organizing, like the Service Employees International Union's successful
security officer campaign here in L.A., but the region's unionization
rates are affected by many other factors," Milkman noted. "If jobs are
lost in nonunion sectors due to an economic downturn, as we've seen
recently in residential construction, for example, that can lead to an
increase in the unionization rate, if other things are stable."