Identify a trend associated with labor union membership in the united states.

Unionization efforts involving some of the most recognizable names in business have dominated headlines across the United States in recent months. Starbucks workers in Buffalo and Amazon employees in Bessemer, Ala., and on Staten Island have recently moved to unionize, as have workers at an REI store in Manhattan last week. Successful strikes at John Deere and Kellogg have drawn new attention to the state of the labor movement as well.

The prominence of these organizing efforts, however, obscures the steady downward trend of union membership in the United States for more than four decades. In 1983, about 20 percent of employees belonged to a union; by 2021, that number had dropped to just over 10 percent, according to data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Union Membership Has Steadily Fallen in the United States

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics By Taylor Johnston

Nearly all that decline has been in the private sector.

Union membership among government workers at the federal, state and local levels has stayed fairly consistent — about a third of workers, give or take a few percentage points — since the 1970s.

Among workers at private companies, on the other hand, union membership has steadily declined for decades, falling to 6 percent last year from 17 percent in 1983.

Share of Employees Who Are Union Members, by Sector

Union membership in the private sector has declined almost every year since 1983.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics By Taylor Johnston

Ruth Milkman, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and School of Labor and Urban Studies, said the stark difference in the public and private trends over the past four decades could be attributed to private employer opposition, along with labor laws that are strongly tilted in favor of employers.

The union drives at Amazon in Bessemer and Starbucks in Buffalo were “textbook examples” of how an employer responds when faced with a unionization effort, she said. Employers “pull out all the stops to try to do everything they can to undermine it, to convince workers not to vote for the union, to intimidate them into being afraid to do so,” she added.

This collection of tactics, carried out steadily over the years, slowly “erodes the unionization rate,” Dr. Milkman said.

After the Starbucks union drive was announced in Buffalo, company officials visited from out of town. Workers who were in favor of unionizing said that they found the officials’ presence to be disruptive and intimidating.

A spokesman for Starbucks, Reggie Borges, said that the company’s actions did not constitute union-busting, saying that the officials had held optional meetings for employees to learn about what unionization might mean for them.

With the Bessemer drive, in which workers voted against unionizing by a two-to-one margin, the National Labor Relations Board in November ordered a new union election after the union argued that Amazon’s installation of a collection box at the warehouse had given workers the impression the company was monitoring votes.

“Our employees have always had the choice of whether or not to join a union, and they overwhelmingly chose not to join the R.W.D.S.U. last year. We look forward to our team in BHM1 having their voices heard again,” Barbara Agrait, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said, referring to the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union at the Bessemer location.

Though union participation has fallen, labor action has not seen the same steady decline. Two recent banner years for work stoppages were 2018 and 2019. The action was driven in part by the “Red for Ed” education strikes, with teachers across the country organizing walkouts for raises and school funding. After a lull in the first year and a half of the pandemic, work stoppages appear to have ticked up again last fall.

Number of Employees Involved in Work Stoppages

In 2018, about 485,000 people participated in large-scale strikes, the largest number since 1983.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Note: Data shows work stoppages of one full shift or longer carried out by 1,000 or more workers, rounded to the nearest thousand. By Taylor Johnston

“I see what’s happening right now as part of that strike wave,” said Lane Windham, a labor historian at Georgetown University. “Sort of that worker uprising that’s been going for a few years, but that has been definitely deepened by worker dissatisfaction during the pandemic.”

A record 4.5 million workers in the United States left their jobs in November 2021 and more than four million workers left their jobs in every month from July through November 2021, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“I think that that’s people voting with their feet. That’s people who don’t have a union saying, ‘I am not doing this anymore,’” Dr. Windham said. “So they’re either leaving their jobs or refusing to take bad jobs.”

The pandemic, with its many challenges, has contributed to labor shortages, Dr. Milkman said. In some cases, school closures and lack of available child care have led parents — most of them women — to stop working for pay. Other workers have chosen to retire early, consider a career change or live for a period on savings.

“It means that employers are having trouble finding workers; it means that any given worker can be picky about what job they take,” Dr. Milkman said.

In November 2020, there were about 6.8 million job openings in the United States. A year later, there were almost 10.6 million, according to the same data.

“Everybody’s hiring. That’s not something we’ve seen in this country any time in recent memory,” Dr. Milkman said. “It doesn't necessarily lead to union activity, but it certainly makes workers feel like they can be more demanding, either individually or collectively.”

Even as union membership has continued to fall in recent years, the labor movement’s popularity is the highest it has been in decades — 68 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, according to a poll from Gallup.

Approval of Labor Unions Continues to Trend Higher

Source: Gallup By Taylor Johnston

The high approval rating may be in part because of increased awareness of union activity thanks to media coverage of prominent organizing efforts. Much of the media coverage of recent union drives has focused on high-profile companies, Dr. Windham said.

(Incidentally, media organizations themselves are among the private companies that have seen a large organizing wave in the past decade — by one count, more than 100 outlets have organized since 2015 — though they represent just a very small portion of the private sector.)

“Many reporters tend to highlight organizing at companies that their readers are most likely to know — like Starbucks and Amazon — and have given less attention to smaller brands or companies, or to organizing among blue-collar work that is more behind the scenes, like in manufacturing,” Dr. Windham said. “But, overall, there does seem to be a general uptick in reporting on labor and workers’ issues, especially in the pandemic, and it hasn’t all been limited to big names.”

Across companies of all sizes and profiles, one labor trend has been noticeable in recent years: Women are taking a bigger role in organizing union drives, in organizing strikes and in becoming union members more generally.

“A lot of people think of labor unions as largely male-dominated industries, but actually, surprisingly, people don’t realize that women are half the labor movement, and the growing sectors of the economy are predominantly female,” Liz Shuler, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said.

While men continue to have higher rates of union membership than women, the gap between those rates has nearly closed in recent years. Women now make up about 47 percent of all union members.

Percentage of Union Membership, by Gender

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics By Taylor Johnston

The decline of unions in the private sector, which were historically male-dominated, and the steady rate of union membership in the public sector also reflect the growing role of women in today’s labor movement, according to Dr. Milkman.

Some so-called pink-collar jobs — those historically associated with, and still primarily held by, women — are among the occupations with higher-than-average union membership. For instance, about 17 percent of employed registered nurses and 46 percent of preschool through secondary school teachers are union members, according to an analysis of government data.

The labor movement provides an outlet for women to voice some of their longstanding concerns about their work, Ms. Shuler said, including equal work for equal pay, better health care benefits and fighting back against harassment on the job.

“It gives me great hope to see women taking their rightful place in leadership in the labor movement, and they’re leading in ways quiet and out in front,” Ms. Shuler said. “They’re leading those picket lines. They’re leading those political mobilizations, and they’re leading at the collective bargaining table to show that the labor movement is a movement for women.”

What has been the trend in union membership in the United States?

What is the current trend in union membership?

Is union membership increasing or decreasing in the United States?

What is the trend of construction union membership over the last ten years?