Unionization efforts involving some of the most recognizable names in business have dominated headlines across the United States in recent months, the New York Times reported. Starbucks workers in Buffalo and Amazon employees in Bessemer, Ala., and on Staten Island have recently moved to unionize, as have workers at an REI store in Manhattan last week. Successful strikes at John Deere and Kellogg have drawn new attention to the state of the labor movement as well. The prominence of these organizing efforts, however, obscures the steady downward trend of union membership in the United States for more than four decades. In 1983, about 20 percent of employees belonged to a union; by 2021, that number had dropped to just over 10 percent, according to data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly all that decline has been in the private sector. Union membership among government workers at the federal, state and local levels has stayed fairly consistent — about a third of workers, give or take a few percentage points — since the 1970s. Among workers at private companies, on the other hand, union membership has steadily declined for decades, falling to 6 percent last year from 17 percent in 1983. Ruth Milkman, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and School of Labor and Urban Studies, said that the pandemic, with its many challenges, has contributed to labor shortages. In some cases, school closures and lack of available child care have led parents — most of them women — to stop working for pay. Other workers have chosen to retire early, consider a career change or live for a period on savings. “It means that employers are having trouble finding workers; it means that any given worker can be picky about what job they take,” Dr. Milkman said. In November 2020, there were about 6.8 million job openings in the United States. A year later, there were almost 10.6 million, according to the same data.
