1995 Union Members — 1996-02-09

About 16.4 million wage and salary employees were union members in 1995, 14.9 percent of all such workers. These figures were down from 16.7 million and 15.5 percent in 1994, the U.S. Department of Labors Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. There were 9.4 million union members in private nonagricultural industries, where they constituted 10.4 percent of wage and salary employment, and 6.9 million in government (federal, state, and local), where they accounted for 37.8 percent of wage and salary employment. In private industry, transportation and public utilities had the highest proportion of workers who were union members (27 percent), followed by construction and manufacturing (each 18 percent), and mining (14 percent). The remaining private industry groups had unionization rates ranging from 2 to 6 percent.