Unions are Disappearing. Do We Care?
Posted: May 26th, 2020
By: Hannah Weiss
Unionization is declining.
A recent report from the Brookings Institute demonstrates that membership in US labor unions has declined since the middle of the twentieth century. Union membership was at its highest in the 1940s and 1950s when almost thirty-five percent of workers belonged to unions. Unionization has declined most in the private sector, with only a little over six percent of private-sector workers belonging to unions in 2018. In contrast, membership in public-sector unions has consistently been about one-third of employees since the 1970s.