On January 23, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its estimates for union membership in the United States in 2012. This issue brief focuses on the union membership numbers by state. In addition to presenting the BLS estimates for overall union membership in each state, we also provide...

While the unionization of most private-sector workers is governed by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the legal scope of collective bargaining for state and local public-sector workers is the domain of states and, where states allow it, local authorities. This hodge-podge of...

One of every nine women in the United States (11.8 percent in 2013) is represented by a union at her place of work. The annual number of hours of paid work performed by women has increased dramatically over the last four decades. In 1979, the typical woman was on the job 925 hours per year; by...

Over the last quarter century, the unionized workforce has changed dramatically, according to this new CEPR report. In 2008, union workers reflected trends in the workforce as a whole toward a greater share of women, Latinos, Asian Pacific Americans, older, more-educated workers, and a shift out...

On January 24, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its estimates for union membership in the United States in 2013. This issue brief focuses on the union membership numbers by gender, education, race, and private vs public sector.

This issue brief looks at the most recent national data available to examine the impact that being in or represented by a union has on the wages and benefits of women in the paid workforce. Even after controlling for factors such as age, race, industry, educational attainment and state of...

In this report, we review the most recent data available to examine the impact of unionization on the wages and benefits paid to black workers. These data show that even after controlling for factors such as age and education level, unionization has a significant positive impact on black...

Currently twenty-four states have “right–to-work” laws, which primarily restrict the rights of workers and employers in the private sector from entering into certain kinds of labor contracts. Federal labor law mandates that unions represent all workers at a workplace, whether they are...

This paper examines the decline in unionization in the United States that began to occur in about 1960. While various explanations have been put forward to explain this – with many focusing on some form of structural changes to the economy or to the workforce, usually related to globalization...

This report makes a series of adjustments to the most common measure of U.S. productivity growth (i.e., non-farm business sector) as well as to measures of wage growth, to determine the extent to which lagging wages can be blamed on weak productivity growth vs. income redistribution. Weak wage...