For a variety of reasons, union membership has declined over the past 40 years. According to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the union membership rate—the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions—was 10 percent in 2023, little changed from the previous year. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.4 million, also showed little movement over the year. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.
This is a little surprising—or not, depending on whether you’re labor or management—given that nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 86 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($1,090 vs. $1,263).