2010 Union Members — 2011-01-21

In 2010, the union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of a union--was 11.9 percent, down from 12.3 percent a year earlier, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers be- longing to unions declined by 612,000 to 14.7 million. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 per- cent, and there were 17.7 million union workers. The data on union membership were collected as part of the Current Population Sur- vey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 households that obtains informa- tion on employment and unemployment among the nation's civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over. For more information see the Technical Note. --The union membership rate for public sector workers (36.2 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private sector workers (6.9 percent).