BLS: Oregon Union Membership Grew 23% Since 2013
A new study shows Oregon saw higher than average union growth in recent years, a trend pushed by strong participation in education, behavioral health and social services.
The productivity platform Plus Docs tracked Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2013 to 2023. Overall, union membership grew in number though it remained flat relative to total population growth.
Oregon saw the ninth-largest increase of the states with 47,000 new members or an increase of around 23%. The state with the biggest union growth was Mississippi followed by Arkansas, Vermont, Utah and New Mexico.
At the other end, Alaska saw the largest decrease in union membership with a decline of 26,000 workers or a loss of 36% of all workers. After the Last Frontier, the states to lose the most union workers were Wisconsin, West Virginia and South Carolina.
As of 2023, union members in Oregon number around a quarter-million, or about 14% of all workers.
Helping drive union growth in Oregon has been Oregon AFSCME, which represents public sector employees and is one of the state’s largest labor organizations. Last year, it saw its ranks grow by 2,900 members, bringing total membership to around 40,000. Most of these workers hail from the behavioral health and social services sector. Around 2,000 are research workers at Oregon Health and Sciences University.
“These are really important workers in our community. They’re often helping people with multiple issues at once,” says David Kreisman, public affairs manager for Oregon AFSCME. “So it’s great we’re seeing them come together to form unions and build power and ensure their communities get what they need.”
AFSCME’s new members work for, among others, Central City Concern, Do Good Multnomah, Lifeworks NW, ColumbiaCare Services, Cascadia Health and the Washington County Juvenile Department. (The state continues to revamp its contracts with county-level behavioral health providers.)
Union growth in Oregon’s public sector is in line with national trends. Unionization was five times higher nationwide in the public sector compared with the private sector. Seven million public sector workers belong to union; around the same number for the private sector. Among occupations, unionization was highest in the education field followed by training and library occupations. It was lowest in sales and related positions, which are unionized at a rate of around 3%.
In 1983 — the first year the BLS collected union membership data as part of its Current Population Survey — union members accounted for around 20% of all U.S. workers. The numbered 17.7 million, whereas today they number 14.4 million.
Overall, around 10% of U.S. workers belong to a union. Hawaii has the highest percent of unionized workers with 24.1% and South Carolina had the lowest with 2.3%. Thirty-two states saw an increase in union growth while the remainder saw net decreases.