page_title: Causes of unemployment in the United States
section_title: Labor unions
hierarchical_section_title: Causes of unemployment in the United States / Domestic factors / Labor unions
caption_attribution_description: Data is for every five years from 2005 to 2010. Source: for 1930 to 2000 from Union Membership Trends in the United States, Table A-1 Apendix A. Source for 2005 and 2010 numbers (wage and salary workers only) from Bureau of Labor Statistics. Chart was created using Excel.
context_page_description: Job creation and unemployment are affected by factors such as aggregate demand, global competition, education, automation, and demographics. These factors can affect the number of workers, the duration of unemployment, and wage rates.
context_section_description: Economist Paul Krugman wrote that historically, worker participation in labor unions gave workers more power in negotiating how corporate profits were split up with shareholders and management. Organized labor acted to limit layoffs. Strong labor unions were a check on executive pay, keeping top executive pay at considerably lower ratios relative to the average worker during the 1950s than during the 2000s. Unions were also a factor in income equality, helping ensure that middle class worker pay rose along with the pay of the higher income brackets.
  However, labor union participation rates have declined steadily in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics annual Union Members Summary: "In 2012, the union membership rate—the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of a union—was 11.3 percent, down from 11.8 percent in 2011. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.4 million, also declined over the year. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers." In 1973, the participation rate was 26.7% against a comparable 2011 rate of 13.1%.
  Differences in labor law and public policy are a key reason for this decline. For example, Canada has gone through many of the same economic and social changes as the U.S. since the middle of the 20th century, but it hasn't seen the same substantial decline in unionization. The unionization rate in the U.S. and Canada followed fairly similar paths from 1920 to the mid-1960s, at which point they began to diverge drastically, with Canada remaining around 30% while the U.S. fell to around 11%.
caption: Union membership in the United States from the Great Depression to 2010
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