Union Membership In Washington: See Recent Trends

Seattle WA

03 September, 2021

6:46 PM

Description

WASHINGTON — The upcoming Labor Day holiday celebrates workers in Washington and across the United States, and many of them are either members of, or represented by, unions. Union membership in Washington was at 17.4 percent in 2020, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics from earlier this year shows. That's approximately 557,000 of 3.2 million Washington employees who were members of unions when the data was taken. Another 39,000 non-union workers' jobs were covered by a union or employee association contract in 2020 even though they themselves weren't members. That's down from Washington's union numbers in 2019. About 638,000 were union members that year, accounting for 18.8 percent of wage and salary workers. However, Washington's union membership remains much higher than the national average, which was 10.8 percent in 2020, according to the labor statistics bureau. The national union membership rate went up by 0.5 percent from 2019. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) Nationally, union membership in 2020 was much more common among public sector workers, 34.8 percent, compared with those in the private sector, 6.3 percent, the labor statistics bureau found in its report, which used membership data collected as part of the monthly Current Population Survey. Unionization rates were the highest among workers in protective service operations (36.6 percent) and education, training and library occupations (35.9 percent). Hawaii and New York had the highest union membership rates in 2019 and 2020, the report found. South Carolina and North Carolina had the two lowest rates both years. It was the Central Labor Union in New York City that started the first Monday of September holiday in 1882. Nearly 140 years later, the New York City Central Labor Council represents about 1.3 workers from every trade in the public and private sectors of the New York economy, according to its website.