Local, state and government workers make up 51.5 percent of all union members, becoming the majority of organized labor for the first time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
The recession battered two industries with high union density — manufacturing and construction — leading to a decline in private sector union membership from 7.6 percent to 7.2 percent of all workers. Private sector union membership plummeted by 10 percent last year, while government unions posted slight gains.
Overall, union membership declined by 771,000 workers, to 15.3 million. That's 12.3 percent among all workers, dropping from 12.4 percent in 2008. Government unions gained 64,000 members. Observers were split along pro-worker and pro-business lines when asked whether the trend was a good one.
The role of unions in the work force has waned along with the "broad social pact that existed in the 1950s and 1960s" between employees and companies, said Harley Shaiken, a labor-relations professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "It has been very difficult for workers to join unions," Shaiken said. "Employers play hardball, and joining a union becomes a sacrifice rather than a right."
J. Justin Wilson, managing director of a group called the Center for Union Facts, which opposes easier unionization, said the fresh data show that union membership is "an outdated concept" and a "relic of Depression-era labor-management relations."
A labor union leader said organizing more government workers is generally easier than trying to recruit union members in private business.
"Employers can retaliate against private-sector workers who want to form a union with impunity, and in the public sector it doesn't work that way," said Damon Silvers, policy director and special counsel at the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest labor federation.
Passing legislation in Congress to make it easier for private sector workers to unionize has been a top priority of organized labor. But that's unlikely to pass this year, now that a Republican victory in a special election in Massachusetts has cost Senate Democrats and their independent allies a 60-seat majority in that body of Congress.
Union membership has collapsed over the past three decades. Union members made up 16.8 percent of the private sector and 20.1 percent of the total work force in 1983 — the peak year based on the way that labor data are tracked.
Bloomberg News contributed to this story.
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