The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its annual report on unionization data in the United States, and the numbers continue to be on the decline for unions as a whole. Membership in unions nationally dropped from 11.3 percent in 2013 to 11.1 percent in 2014. Other interesting data points in the report include:
- Public-sector workers had a union membership rate of 35.7 percent, more than five times higher than that of private-sector workers (6.6 percent).
- Workers in education, training, and library occupations and in protective service occupations had the highest unionization rate at 35.3 percent for each occupation group.
- Men had a higher union membership rate (11.7 percent) than women (10.5 percent) in 2014.
- Among states, New York continued to have the highest union membership rate (24.6 percent), and North Carolina again had the lowest rate (1.9 percent).