BLS Report Shows New Low for Union Membership

Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to boost Big Labor, a government report shows that union membership in the United States has hit a new low.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the national union membership rate fell to 10.0 percent in 2023, down from 10.1 percent in 2022. This union membership rate for 2023 was the lowest recorded in the history of BLS’s survey. At just 10 percent, the rate sits at less than half of the 20.1 percent statistic recorded in 1983, the first year that BLS reported the data.

The decrease in union membership in 2023 was driven mainly by public sector unions, which saw their membership drop from 33.1 percent in 2022 to 32.5 percent in 2023, a record low. Private sector union membership, meanwhile, held steady at 2022’s all-time low of 6.0 percent.

It’s important to note that in the private sector, the raw number of union members increased from last year, but higher non-union job growth kept the percentage of workers who belong to a union steady at 6.0 percent. In the public sector, union membership decreased in numbers as well as in percentage since the previous year.

Union membership rates vary greatly between different states. The states with the highest union membership rates in 2023 were Hawaii (24.1 percent), New York (20.6 percent), and Washington (16.5 percent), while the states with the lowest union membership rates were South Carolina (2.3 percent), North Carolina (2.7 percent), and South Dakota (3.6 percent).

Twenty-one states in total saw their unionization rates fall in 2023. Even Michigan, which repealed its right-to-work law last year, saw its union membership rate drop from 14.0% in 2022 to 12.8% in 2023. Michigan’s right-to-work repeal is expected to come into effect in February 2024.

President Biden, the self-declared “most pro-union President in American history,” has made it his administration’s mission to prop up labor bosses at the expense of worker freedom. Biden’s bureaucrats recently rewrote federal regulations on independent contractors and the joint employer standard to push more workers into the grasp of labor unions and streamline unionization efforts. More alarmingly, the PRO Act, the flagship labor package from President Biden and congressional Democrats, would codify these harmful regulations as well as eliminate right-to-work protections nationwide.

Despite all these attempts, the rate of labor union membership in the United States has fallen further every single year of Biden’s presidency. American workers continue to reject forced labor union membership, instead choosing freedom and self-determination in the workplace.