Someone looking at the annual "Union Members" report released this morning by the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics would logically conclude that 2014 was a year organized labor would rather forget.
While average nonagricultural wage and salary employment increased by over 2.32 million from 2013 to 2014, union membership only went up by 48,000, or about 2 percent of the nationwide increase. Additionally, the private sector's 41,000-person pickup in union membership was only 1.6 percent of its total 2.55 million increase. Yes, that means that public-sector union membership increased a bit while public-sector employment declined by 226,000. Of course, no such decidedly negative nuggets made their way into Labor Secretary Tom Perez's press release or Tom Raum's Associated Press report, excerpts of which follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):
US REPORTS SLIGHT DECLINE IN UNION MEMBERSHIP DURING 2014
Union membership in the United States is down slightly, accounting for just over 11 percent of the workforce last year, the Labor Department reported Friday.
That's just a fractional drop from the year before. [1]
The department's Bureau of Labor Statistics said public-sector workers have the highest union membership rate at nearly 36 percent. That's more than five times higher than membership of private-sector workers at less than 7 percent.
... Earnings were higher for union members last year, at $970 a week versus $763 a week for non-union members. [2]
With 58 months of consecutive job growth, the report shows that "workers made great strides and confronted great challenges" during 2014. [3]
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka cited "major organizing wins" last year, including one at American Airlines. Trumka also cited "multiple state victories on (raising) the minimum wage and innovative campaigns conducted by carwash workers, among others." [4]
... Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez said the report demonstrates that "the economy is resurgent, with an unemployment rate well below 6 percent and job growth we haven't experienced since the late 1990s." [5]
Notes:
[1] — "Just a fractional drop," because 98 percent of the jobs added went to non-union members. (To be clear, the category "represented by unions," which also includes those who refuse to join unions but nonetheless work under their contracts, increased by 124,000, and their share of the workforce dropped from 12.4 percent to 12.3 percent.)
[2] — The Labor Department release warned readers that "The comparisons of earnings in this release are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences." Of course, the AP provided no such warning. It's reasonable to believe that Raum wants readers to have the impression that being in a union magically leads to a 25 percent or so pay hike. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that most AP employees are represented by the News Media Guild, could it?
A significant part of the explanation for the earnings difference is that 24.6 percent of workers in high-cost New York are union members. That's 13.6 percent of the nation's unionized workforce in a state with only 6.2 percent of the nation's population — and a likely disproportionate percentage of that cadre works in super-high-cost New York City.
[3] — Readers who are wondering where that quote came are not imagining things. Raum didn't attribute it to anyone. It's not in the report itself, and it's not in Perez's press release. I give up, Tom. Who said or wrote that?
[4] — Until the law of supply and demand is repealed, Trumka's alleged triumphs, particularly the minimum-wage efforts, will hold back overall employment while (he hopes) protecting existing union members.
[5] — To the extent the economy is genuinely "resurgent" (really, not so much, as seen in a post earlier today), it's been achieved with private-sector workers getting nonunion jobs. Here, following a sharp decline in union-member workers of over 600,000 from 2009 to 2010, is how the number of union, additional union-represented, and nonunion-involved workers has changed in the past four years:
Yet President Barack Obama remains organized labor's hero. Go figure.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
