Posts tagged union rate
Get on the Job and Organize with Inside Organizer School
November 23, 2025 // On November 6, a panel of labor organizers local to the Twin Cities gathered with the IOS at the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul, Minn. The conversation centered on Brisack’s book, Get on the Job and Organize: Standing up for a Better Workplace and a Better World, which was released in April. Packed with labor history, the book is about Brisack’s experience salting at Starbucks, but also about their experience as an external organizer for union campaigns at Nissan and Tesla. The conversation was not limited to salting. During the event, panelists connected wisdom from the book to their own experiences organizing different industries in Minnesota, and shared tips and stories with audience members about organizing in general.
WATCH: Questions about solvency, union membership remain regarding WA Cares
November 16, 2025 // Opponents of WA Cares argue that the program is not primarily designed to help all Washingtonians, but rather to benefit unions like SEIU 775, which advocates for more taxpayer-funded caregivers, particularly regarding the possibility of family caregivers being required to pay some of their income to a union. “We still don't have clear guidance on whether or not family members are going to be allowed to opt out of union representation,” said Elizabeth New, director of the Center for Health Care and the Center for Worker Rights at the free-market Washington Policy Center think tank. “They say that they will be. But I've been waiting for it for a couple of years now, and I keep asking at every opportunity.”
Declining union membership could be making working-class Americans less happy and more susceptible to drug overdoses
November 6, 2025 // We are continuing to research the connections between union membership and public health. The next question we are working on is whether a decline in union membership can have a multigenerational impact, going beyond the workers employed today and affecting the lives of their children and grandchildren.
The 15 Most Unionized Places in America
October 16, 2025 // To determine the most unionized locations in the U.S., researchers at Construction Coverage analyzed data from UnionStats.com and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The researchers ranked metropolitan statistical areas according to total union members as a percentage of total employment. In addition to union membership, the researchers also included statistics on union representation, which is the share of workers whose terms of work are collectively negotiated (whether or not they are union members). Only metropolitan statistical areas with available data were included in the analysis.
Newt’s World Episode 899: Employee Rights Act
October 13, 2025 // Newt talks with Vincent Vernuccio, President of the Institute for the American Worker about the Employee Rights Act of 2025, a legislative proposal aimed at enhancing and safeguarding the rights of American workers while promoting fairness and accountability in the workplace. Introduced by Senator Tim Scott and Congressman Rick Allen, the bill represents a Republican vision for the workforce, focusing on empowering workers, improving unions, and fostering innovation and growth. Vernuccio highlights the outdated nature of current labor laws,
The future of white-collar work may be unionized
October 10, 2025 // “The way layoffs happened at Google, where it wasn’t clear what the reason for people getting laid off was, definitely created a sense of job insecurity and mistrust,” says Parul Koul, a software engineer at Google and president of the Alphabet Workers Union. Another driver has been artificial intelligence threatening to replace entry-level knowledge work. Few white-collar industries epitomize the challenge of integrating AI into workflows more than the practice of law. While many legal experts say AI will have a transformative impact by automating repetitive research tasks, some also fear it will dilute entry-level associate roles at law firms.
Commentary: Unions Are Shrinking Nationwide—But Not in California
September 3, 2025 // California, though, is noteworthy for its steady union presence. It hasn’t fluctuated much since 2005, despite the national decline. Further, the federal data set used to produce the union figures does not include home health care and child care workers who are classified as self-employed. In California, that takes in some 700,000 workers, even though their hourly wages are negotiated with individual counties through unions.
Labor unions are much stronger in Oregon than nationally
September 2, 2025 // Nearly 300,000 Oregon workers belong to a union, according to federal data, about 1 in 6 workers statewide. Union membership rates have fluctuated since the 1980s but have gradually increased over the past two decades.
The share of Californians in unions holds steady as nationwide numbers continue decline
August 28, 2025 // The report, which analyzed data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that the percentage of Californians covered by a union has hovered between 16% and 18% in the last two decades. In 2024, the most recent year analyzed by researchers, the Golden State’s 2.67 million union-represented workers amounted to 16.3% of its labor force. Unions have only been able to sustain those numbers through consistent new organizing, said Enrique Lopezlira, director of the Low-Wage Work Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and a co-author of the report.
5.9% of Washington Workers Are Union Members, 6th Most in the U.S.
June 9, 2025 // Union membership in the United States has declined to its lowest point in decades. In 1979, unions represented 24.1% of the American workforce. By 2024, that share had fallen to just 9.9%, according to figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and UnionStats. In absolute terms, this represents a drop of roughly 6.7 million members—from a peak of 20.9 million in 1979 to around 14.2 million in 2024.