Labor Day marks gains for labor
Labor Day in New York City this year won’t come with parades or big, public celebrations — but the very pandemic that tampered this year’s festivities also contributed to a push in unionization, giving labor leaders newfound optimism.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that while the total number of wage and salary workers represented by a union in the U.S. fell by roughly 321,000 in 2020 from 2019 — the percentage of the American workforce that’s unionized actually went up, from 10.3% to 10.8%. The numbers show the economy took a hit at the onset of the pandemic resulting in a huge wave of unemployment — but unionized workers were less likely to lose their jobs.
Roughly 24% — or nearly 21 million— American workers were unionized in 1979. Last year just 14.2 million workers were in unions, the lowest number since the feds began keeping statistics.
But national labor bosses feel there are plenty of signs that U.S. labor unions are on the comeback, and will regain some of the power they’ve lost over the last four decades.
“The one huge indicator for me that labor is bouncing back is the amount of organizing we’re doing across the South right now,” said John Samuelsen, president of Transport Workers Union, which represents a majority of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s workforce as well as thousands of other public and private transportation workers across the country.
“We have organizing drives going on all across Texas and Florida and Georgia,” said Samuelsen. “We’re at best a mid-sized national union, but what you’re seeing in the South is unbelievable. In the dark days of the pandemic, I kept saying the silver lining will be that its economic and fiscal toll would make it clear that unionization is the best choice for workers and their families.”
Samueslen hails from New York, which has the second-highest rate of union membership out of any state in the U.S. Roughly 22% of the employees in the state are part of a union, including 68% of public sector employees.
Florida, Texas and Georgia — where Samuelsen and the TWU are pushing workers to organize — all have union membership rates of less than 8%.