Public Sector Unions Today: The Challenge

The ability of public sector unions to organize a comparatively large segment of their workforce and to maintain their membership levels compared to the declining density and membership levels in the private sector, has greatly increased the relative influence of public sector unions in the American labor movement. In the 1950s and 1960s, unions that largely drew their membership from the private sector, such as the Teamsters, United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, and the Carpenters Union, were the largest and most influential labor organizations in the United States. The most influential labor leaders of that period (e.g. George Meany, the first president of the AFL-CIO, came from the Plumbers Union; Walter Reuther was president of the Autoworkers; Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters) represented private sector unions.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2014, the union membetship rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions--was 11.1 percent, down 0.2 percentage points from 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.  The number of wage and salary workers belonging to union, at 14.6 million, was little different from 2013.  In 1983, the first year for which comparable union date are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 union workers.

Public sector unions have also become one of the most powerful players on the American political scene, especially when we consider the resources they contribute to politics and the impact they have on elections.

Public sector unions today appear to be in a very similar position to private sector unions in the 1950s and 1960s. The rapid membership growth that government unions enjoyed in recent decades appears to be slowing, and prospects for enactment of additional legislation favorable to public sector bargaining—the key factor that spurred past union growth—are not great. Moreover, there appears to be considerable public support for cutting taxes and transferring significant government functions to the private sector, both of which would weaken public sector unions.