Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report on union membership in the U.S., and—no surprise here—the percentage of workers who belong to a union continues its precipitous decline, dropping 0.2 points to 10.3 percent from 2018 to 2019. (In 1983, the first year the BLS collected this data, union membership was at 20.1 percent.) Public-sector workers are five times more likely than private-sector workers to be union members; blacks are slightly more likely to be to join unions than whites, Asians, or Hispanics; and union members tend to earn more a week than nonunion members.
North Carolina, of course, is a notoriously anti-labor state and has been for decades. In 1947, it banned closed shops; 12 years later, it barred public employees from collective bargaining. Not coincidentally, it consistently has one of the lowest union membership rates in the country—and it also hews to the federal minimum wage and has a Department of Labor that safeguards corporations more than workers.
Let’s dig into the fruits of our anti-labor.
Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman at jbillman@indyweek.com.
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