1999 Union Members — 2000-01-19

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. 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.