Portside

Organized labor is celebrating the life and legacy of an artist who championed working women and carried a union card for almost 60 years.

Union membership has been dropping since 1983. At that time about 20 percent of U.S. workers were in a union, which itself was a big drop from the 1950s, when unions represented more than one-third of American workers.

The gains in union membership in 2023 were driven entirely by workers under the age of 45, says Heidi Shierholz, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

Majorities of Americans continue to see the long-term decline in the share of workers represented by unions as a bad thing for both the country and working people in the United States, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted from March 27 to April 2.

Largely ignored is the positive role veterans from working-class backgrounds have played in key labor and political struggles since the mid-20th century.

Last year, the union membership rate fell by 0.2 percentage points to 10.1% — the lowest on record. The absolute number of American workers in unions did grow in 2022 — by approximately 200,000. But the number of non-union jobs grew faster.

As more strikes succeed, Kate Bahn, chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, says workers are more likely to organize them at their own workplaces.

Nick Driedger argues that most metrics by which unions are measured obscure what is really important.

Between 2019 and 2021, the overall percentage of U.S. union members stayed flat. But the percentage of workers ages 25-34 who are union members rose from 8.8% to 9.4%, or around 68,000 workers, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.