It would have been hard to imagine half a century ago, when more than a third of American workers belonged to labor unions, that union membership would decline to less than 12 percent today.
But that is exactly what has happened.
The newest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics are in, and they are not good news for Big Labor. In 2010, labor unions across the country lost 612,000 members. The unionized percentage of the U.S. workforce fell from 12.3 percent in 2009 to 11.9 percent last year.
In the private sector, union membership plunged from 7.2 percent in 2009 to 6.9 percent in 2010. That is “a low point not seen since the infancy of the labor movement in the 1930s,” the Associated Press noted.
Very unusual is that unionization of government workers fell — down 1.2 percent, to 36.2 percent. That wasn’t because government workers were purposely avoiding unions, but because years of excessive spending have finally started catching up with lots of state and local governments, forcing layoffs of government workers.