Max Whittaker for The New York Times
Firefighters protested a law curbing collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin in 2011. Union membership fell by 13 percent in the state last year.
The long, slow decline in the number of American workers belonging to labor unions accelerated sharply last year, according to data reported on Wednesday, sending the unionization rate to its lowest level in a century.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the total number of union members fell by 400,000 last year even though the nation’s overall employment rose by 2.4 million nationwide last year. The percentage of workers in unions fell to 11.3 percent, down from 11.8 percent in 2011, the bureau found in its annual report on union membership. That brought unionization to its lowest level since 1912, when it was 11.1 percent, according to a study by two Rutgers economists, Leo Troy and Neil Sheflin.
There were several reasons for the steep one-year decline in union membership, according to labor experts. Most prominent were new laws that capped the power of unions in Wisconsin, Indiana and other states. But the continued expansion by manufacturers like Caterpillar and Boeing in non-union states, and the growth of sectors like retail and restaurants, where unions have little presence, also contributed.
“These numbers are very discouraging for labor unions,” said Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University. “It’s a time for unions to stop being clever about excuses for why membership is declining, and it’s time to figure out how to devise appeals to the workers out there.”
Labor unions have boasted of their political successes in helping to re-elect President Obama and helping Democrats to pick up seats in the House and the Senate.
But the figures announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics point to grave problems for the future of organized labor. The portion of private-sector workers in unions fell to just 6.6 percent last year, from 6.9 percent in 2011, causing some labor experts to question whether unions are sinking toward irrelevance in the private sector.
The report showed particular drops in union membership in two sectors where unions have long been strong: local government employees and manufacturing workers.
Union membership showed sharp drops in union membership in Wisconsin, which passed a law in 2011 curbing the collective bargaining rights of many public employees, and Indiana, which enacted a “right to work” law last January that may have prompted many workers to drop their union membership to avoid having to pay union dues or union fees. The B.L.S. report showed that union membership fell by 13 percent last year in Wisconsin and by 18 percent in Indiana — both unusually large numbers for a single year.
Barry Hirsch, a labor economist at Georgia State University, said an analysis he conducted found that the number of government employees in Wisconsin who belong to a union slid by 48,000 last year, to 139,000 from 187,000, as many public-sector workers evidently decided to quit their unions after the Republican-led legislature stripped them of most of their bargaining rights.
Speaking about the nation as a whole, Professor Hirsch said: “I am really surprised that the drop in unionization was as large as it is in a single year, and it was particularly big in the public sector. It does seem you are seeing reductions in some of the states that you might expect.”
For instance, in Indiana, where the “right to work” law took effect last March, unionization dropped to 9.1 percent from 11.3 percent in 2011. Michigan enacted a similar law last month. Such laws bar employers from requiring employees to pay union dues or fees, making union membership less attractive.
The bureau said union membership among public-sector employees fell to 35.9 percent in 2012, from 37.0 percent the previous year. The number of government workers in unions fell by 234,000, as many teachers, police officers and other lost their jobs. There were 7.3 million public employees in unions, compared with 7 million for private-sector workers.
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Union Membership Drops Despite Job Growth
