Union approval up, but membership down

African Americans, women see steepest declines as Janus ruling has effect

Former Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis waves to people during a Bud Billiken Parade in previous years. This year’s annual parade was canceled by the pandemic. (Facebook/Chicago Teachers Union)

By Ted Cox

Public support for unions is rising even as membership declines.

An annual Gallup poll released last week found that public approval for unions is at its highest point since 2003, with almost two-thirds of citizens across the nation, 65 percent, in support of unionized labor. That’s up from the Great Recession a decade ago, when public approval for unions briefly dipped below 50 percent, and at its highest level since the mid-’60s, when it topped 70 percent, and the mid-’50s, when it peaked at 75 percent, three-quarters of the populace.

Yet an annual report on “The State of the Unions 2020” found union membership has declined in Chicago and across the state over that same decade since the Great Recession, and the drop has been pronounced since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Janus case two years ago.

According to the report, union membership among workers has dropped both of the last two years, even as data show that unions increase wages across the state by 10.7 percent on average. Last year’s report detected a decline after a rise in union membership the year before.

The new report also blamed the pandemic for its impact on low-wage jobs typically held by women and African Americans — two demographic groups that have seen the percentage of union laborers decline over the last decade.

“In the face of a once-in-a-century pandemic and rising economic inequality, this study underscores an alarming pattern for workers in Illinois and across America,” said study co-author Frank Manzo IV, head of the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, in a statement accompanying a news release on the annual study, “especially when you consider that union membership is correlated with a 10 percent to 11 percent boost in worker wages on average and substantially higher rates of health-insurance coverage.”

“While union membership continues to offer vital protections for certain workers, the data make clear that this pool of workers is shrinking and some are disproportionately being left behind,” added study co-author Robert Bruno, director of the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “For example, women and workers of color have long been overrepresented in the lowest-paying service and domestic occupations where unionization rates are low, and these workers have made up a disproportionate share of people who have lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“Women and workers of color have long been overrepresented in the lowest-paying service and domestic occupations where unionization rates are low, and these workers have made up a disproportionate share of people who have lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Professor Robert Bruno (Twitter)

According to data from the U.S. Department of Labor, union membership has been on a slow decline nationally since 2010, when it stood at 11.9 percent of U.S. workers, to 10.3 percent last year.

Some 13.6 percent of Illinois workers belong to a union, for the state to rank 13th nationally, but that’s down from 15.5 percent a decade ago — a loss of 72,000 union jobs, most of those in Chicago, where 46,000 union jobs have been lost, with the percentage of union workers falling from 15.6 percent a decade ago to 12.5 percent last year.

According to the news release, the report blames much of the decline in national union membership, “from nearly a quarter of all workers in the 1980s to just over 10 percent today,” on a trend over the last decades in what it called “anti-union activity in state legislatures and the courts.” The Illinois public sector has always been heavily unionized, and the study points out that “nearly half of all public-sector workers are unionized in both Illinois (45.8 percent) and the Chicago metro area (45.4 percent), exceeding the national public-sector average (33.6 percent).”

But, across the state, the release added, “total union membership declined 7 percent since 2017, the year before the Supreme Court’s Janus decision that effectively encouraged more workers to either drop their memberships or stop paying collective bargaining fees.” The study attacked that practice as “free-riding” on the benefits of union membership and collective bargaining.

Education and health services are the backbone of the union movement in Illinois, accounting for more than a third of all union workers across the state. But in the private sector the unionization rate is under 9 percent — despite the increased wages promised by unions and the increasing public support across the nation for union workers.

“African Americans, military veterans, men, middle-aged workers, and workers with master’s degrees are more likely to be union members,” the study found, but at the same time “African Americans and women have seen the steepest drops in union membership rates over the past decade,” again in those low-wage positions typically not covered by unions. By contrast, many jobs considered essential in the pandemic are union positions.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has been a stark reminder that working people keep Illinois’s economy functioning,” the study concluded. “The workers propping up the economy were largely hourly employees who are protected most by union representation. As Illinois recovers from unprecedented job losses, the labor movement will be essential in protecting and rebuilding the state’s middle class. As Illinois and the nation recover from unprecedented job losses, the labor movement will continue to play a key role in rebuilding the middle class. However, recent membership declines suggest that it will have fewer resources available to do this important work.”

“The labor movement has and will continue to play a key role in growing wages and expanding economic opportunity for American workers,” Bruno said. “Yet as Illinois and the nation begin the hard work of economic recovery, sagging union membership will mean that workers will have fewer resources with which to bargain for both the benefits we’ve all come to value during this pandemic and the restoration of ladders to the middle class that have been lost over the past decade.”

The Gallup poll found a significant partisan divide in the U.S. electorate, with a majority of Democrats and independents approving of unions — 83 and 64 percent, both up from a year ago — while just 45 percent of Republicans approve of unions, same as last year.