The state of the unions in 2021

The highs and the lows across the state

As expected, the CFA membership voted “Yes” on the tentative agreement; the official results were announced on Thursday morning by the CFA in an email to members (95% yes with high turnout). This is great news for the union and, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, it’s a historic contract. The agreement proves that the CSU administration is on track to continue to invest in the CSU after over a decade of declining per student funding, starting in the early-2000s through 2014 or so.

The victory is also a reminder that unions remain a significant political economic force – despite declining unionization rates and strike activity. Coincidentally, union membership rates for 2021 were just published (I get mine through unionstats.com), so I thought I’d write today about what the latest statistics show about the labor movement in California.

First, national union membership and coverage rates continued to decline in 2021, proving that the increase we saw in 2020 was just because the denominator (“total employees”) shrank so much that the overall fraction – union members divided by total employees – increased.

While California has generally followed the same downward course, there are some encouraging signs. First, over the last 27 years union density has declined by 1.8 percentage points, so that by 2021, 15.9% of workers were union members. At the national level, there was 4.6 percentage point decline national over the same period so that by 2021, 10.3 percent of workers were union members. In other words, the “good news” is that the state’s union density is declining less than the national average.

The second encouraging sign is that the public sector is growing in membership density in California. Again between 1995 and 2021, the membership rate for this sector grew 3.2 percentage points from 51.3% to 54.5%, even while the national public sector density declined from 37.7% to 33.9%, or 3.8 percentage points, over the same period.

Things look even better in the Inland Empire. We have an 18.1% overall membership rate and about the same public sector membership rate as California (54.4%). However, as my colleague Eric Nilsson notes, sample sizes for metro areas are small which can create a lot of noise in estimates for the IE, so it’s important to not read too much into these statistics, especially from a year-to-year basis.

Of course, the most important thing is what this means for the nearly 500,000 students that attend one of the 23 California State University campuses. The CSU serves as a major engine of social mobility in the state. Let’s hope that engine gets the fuel it needs to keep running, and running well, for a long time.