Connecticut Ranks #14 in Union Membership
/Connecticut’s percentage of union members in its workforce – 13.5 percent - places the state at #14 in the nation for the percentage of union members. The top ten states are New York (24.4 percent), Alaska (23.1 percent), Hawaii (22.1 percent), Washington (18.9 percent), Rhode Island (16.9 percent), California (16.4 percent), Michigan (16.3 percent), New Jersey (16 percent), Illinois (15.8 percent), and Nevada (14.6 percent).
At the ot
her end of the scale, the states with the smallest percentage of union members are Utah, Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas and North Carolina, all under 4 percent union members, according to data reported by Bloomberg.com.
Connecticut, ranked #14 just behind Massachusetts, has seen its percentage of union membership decline from 16.4 percent in 2000 to 14 percent at the start of 2012 to 13.5 percent at the start of 2013.
Nationwide, union membership has dropped from 20.1% of the workforce in 1983 to 11.2% last year, according to the website 24/7 Wall Street.
The union membership rate is defined as the percent of wage and salary workers that are members of a union. The data on union membership were collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 households that obtains employment information among the nation’s civilian non-institutional population aged 16 and over.
The union membership rate is updated annually by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The data used was from 2012; the 2013 data is anticipated in September 2014.
