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Amid National Turmoil and Tumult, a Union Renaissance May Be Afoot
In January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported union membership in the United States in 2021 to be at 10.3 percent while the number of unionized workers continued its decline to 14 million.
To put that into perspective, in 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the unionization rate was 20.1 percent with 17.7 million union workers.
One of the intentional casualties of 40 years of neo-liberal Reaganomics is the precipitous drop in public-sector unions.
But we might finally be entering a unionization renaissance.
As The Guardian reported in March:
“The recent, much-publicized wave of union victories in the US at companies as varied as the giant coffee chain Starbucks, trendy outdoor outfitters REI and media group the New York Times is spurring hopes that this will somehow turn into a much larger unionization wave that lifts millions of Americans.
“This is an unusually promising moment for unions, labor strategists say, as they strain to figure out how best to build a larger wave, although they acknowledge it won’t be easy because US corporations fight so fiercely against unionization.”
