Wisconsin's Union Membership Continues to Decline

Monday, January 30th, 2023 -- 9:07 AM

(By Joe Schulz, Wisconsin Public Radio) Wisconsin’s union membership continued to decline last year despite increased unionization efforts in the service industry and while polling shows labor unions have become more popular than they’ve been in more than a half-century.

According to Joe Schulz with Wisconsin Publi Radio, union membership in the state declined by 28,000 in 2022 and fell below 200,000 for the first time since at least 1989, according to data released last week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Although the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not have historical data for 1994, union membership the years before and after 1994 was more than 400,000. Last year, Wisconsin had 187,000 union members, a 13 percent decrease from 2021's total of 215,000.

That’s the state’s biggest drop in union membership since 2015. While it was the sharpest decline in recent years, it was the continuation of a more than three-decade slide. In 1989, unions represented 20.9 percent of the state’s total workforce. Last year, union membership fell to just 7.1 percent.

The decline is attributed to a combination of market changes and legislative efforts. Those include the passage of Act 10 in 2011, which limited public employees’ ability to collectively bargain, and Wisconsin becoming a right-to-work state in 2015, along with a decline in manufacturing jobs over time.

Wisconsin isn’t alone when it comes to decreasing unionization rates, as the national rate of 10.1 percent is the lowest on record, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s despite high profile cases of workers organizing at companies like Amazon and Starbucks around the country.

In Wisconsin, several Starbucks stores unionized in 2022. A store in Green Bay recently became the state’s fifth Starbucks to unionize. Unions have also become increasingly popular with the public even as their membership has dwindled.

Seventy-one percent of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest percentage since 1965, according to Gallup, an analytics and polling firm.

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