Federal Daily News
Unions hold fast in public sector; fed membership ticks upward
The union membership rate in the public sector in 2011 was more than five times higher than in the private sector, according to a new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Public-sector membership stood at 37 percent last year, compared to 6.9 percent for private-sector workers.
U.S. union membership overall was relatively static—with members comprising 11.8 percent of the U.S. workforce in 2011, compared to 11.9 percent a year earlier. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions also was nearly unchanged at 14.8 million. Of those, 7.6 million were public-sector employees, and 7.2 million private-sector workers, according to the report.
Among public-sector employees, local government had the highest percentage of union membership at 42.3 percent; membership at the state government level was 31.1 percent.
As for the federal sector, while total union membership across the public sector dipped from 2010 to 2011, slightly more feds were union members or represented by union contracts in 2011 than in 2010, according to the report.
Union membership among federal employees stood at 28.1 percent of the federal workforce in 2011, up from 26.8 percent in 2010. In all, 33.2 percent of feds were in jobs covered by union or employee association contracts in 2011, compared to 31.4 percent the prior year, according to the report.
About 1 million federal employees were union members in 2011, compared to 984,000 in 2010. The number of feds in jobs covered by union or employee group contracts grew by approximately 30,000 positions from 2010 to 2011.
The union membership numbers were collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 households.