2017 Union Members — 2018-01-19

The union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions--was unchanged at 10.7 percent in 2017, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.8 million in 2017, edged up by 262,000 from 2016. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers. The data on union membership are collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 eligible households that obtains information on employment and unemployment among the nation's civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over. For more information, see the Technical Note in this news release. --The union membership rate of public-sector workers (34.4 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than that of private- sector workers (6.5 percent).