The state of the unions in California and the Inland Empire
A quick summary of today’s newsletter: The latest unionization statistics show that regional membership rates continue to decline. The picture is more mixed at the state level, with some recent gains in public sector union membership. Overall rates have trended downward for many years, and so it’s hard to say whether anything specific or recent has caused them to do so. A quick look at the numbers suggests that the 2018 Supreme Court decision on Janus vs. AFSCME has not affected public sector unions, at least in California.
Unionization statistics at the national, state, and even metro level are available at unionstats.com. You can also use that site to check statistics by different industries, occupations, and demographic groups. The website is an excellent resource which compiles data from the Current Population Survey. Although the sample sizes are small at the metro area (meaning it could be hard to extrapolate anything from one or two years of data), statewide statistics are more reliable and suggest a consistent downward trend in unionization - of both private and public sector workers.
In 2022, the union density rate (% of workers in a union) in the Inland Empire was 17.8%, down from 18.1% a year earlier. The statistics varied considerably by sector: of all public sector workers in the region, 53.5% were in a union in 2022 (down from 54.4% in 2021) while just 10.8% of private sector workers were in a union (down from 11.0% in 2021).
The chart above plots regional membership and coverage rates between 2000 and 2022. As you can see, union density rose somewhat in the 2000s and reached a peak after the Great Recession. Since 2012, rates have steadily declined. There was a brief respite in 2019 and 2020, as rates temporarily went back up, but by 2022, membership and coverage rates were heading back downward.
One thing to note about these statistics is that they are based on a very small sample size. There are about 1,200 observations on which the above statistics are based. Statistics from California overall are more reliable, since they are based on about 11,000 observations. They show that the total worker union membership rate in California in 2022 was 16.1%, compared to 15.9% a year earlier. Again, there is a big public-private difference: 53.5% in the former and 9.3% in the latter.
At the state level, due to the larger sample sizes, we can answer an ongoing question: how has the Janus decision affected public sector unionization?
The Supreme Court decision in Janus vs. AFSCME fundamentally altered the public sector labor movement. Prior to Janus, unions were allowed to collect agency fees from anyone covered by their contract. Agency fees are a subset (fraction) of union dues that are used specifically by unions to collectively bargain for new contracts and for day-to-day operations that serve their members, like handling grievances. The decision in Janus in June 2018 made the collection of such agency fees illegal. In the post-Janus world, anyone covered by a union contract could theoretically pay zero dues to their union, potentially weakening public sector unions’ abilities to increase membership.
The chart above compares public and private sector unionization (membership) rates in California. While private sector unionization rates have slowly but steadily declined, public sector rates have been much more volatile. They rose from 2000 and 2012, and and they have declined since the early 2010s. However, since 2018, public sector union density has actually trended upward. This is an encouraging sign that Janus has not dealt any major blows to public sector unionization efforts.
An ongoing concern is whether the decline in public sector employment density will reduce membership rates. As I mentioned in a previous newsletter article, public sector employment as a percentage of total nonfarm employment in the Inland Empire is down since 2020. If this trend continues, it will reduce union density in the region and the state.