The recession is finally taking its toll on national, state and
local unionization rates, according to UCLA's annual report on
organized labor.
Following an uptick last year, unionization rates fell between
July 1, 2009, and June 30, 2010, by just more than half a
percentage point in California and by a full percentage point in
the five-county Los Angeles metropolitan area, researchers at
UCLA's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE)
found.
"Given the duration and depth of the recession, it was
inevitable that union jobs would be hit," said Lauren Appelbaum,
the report's lead author and director of research at the IRLE.
"Jobs are continuing to disappear, and unionized jobs continue to
disappear along with them."
"The State of the Unions in 2010: A Profile of Union Membership
in Los Angeles, California and the Nation" publishes on Labor Day,
Sept. 6.
Even with the losses, the Los Angeles metro area accounts for
nearly half of the union members in California, which is the most
heavily unionized state in the nation.
"In recent years, unions in Los Angeles have been at the head of
the pack, and they've been having successes that unions are not
having elsewhere," said IRLE director Christopher C. Tilly, a
professor of urban planning at the UCLA School of Public Affairs.
"That makes Los Angeles an important laboratory for unions and for
labor-watchers."
The findings in the report are based on labor figures in the
U.S. Current Population Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics and the U.S Census Bureau. The UCLA report tracks
year-to-year changes in unionization for the nation, California and
the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which includes the counties of
Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange, Ventura and San Bernardino.
The report found that unionization rates also dipped nationally,
but by a smaller margin than in the Los Angeles metro area and the
state. The overall unionization rate in the U.S. was 12.1 percent,
down from 12.4 percent the previous year.
The proportion of the workforce that is unionized now stands at
16.5 percent in Los Angeles and 17.6 percent in California. With
gains made by unions in 2008 and 2009 now wiped out, Los Angeles
and California unionization rates have returned to their
2007 levels. Unionization rates had been climbing steadily
since 2007, after having been relatively flat for a
decade.
Especially heavily hit this year was the nation's private
sector, which for the first time ever employed fewer union members
than the public sector. The public sector has long boasted a larger
concentration of union members, but because the private sector is
so much larger, the absolute number of union members in the private
sector had always exceeded that in the public sector.
The number of union workers employed in the private sector fell
from approximately 7.91 million in 2008 to 7.19 million in
2009, while the number of public-sector union workers
dropped from 7.86 million to 7.76 million.
"These figures are less a reflection on how well the public
sector is doing than a testament to how many jobs have been lost in
the private sector," Appelbaum said.
From 2008 to 2009, unionization rates were
down across a range of industry groupings, with the most
significant losses in:
- Transportation and utilities, which fell in Los Angeles from
41.5 percent to 34.3 percent and in California from 41.7 percent to
36.4 percent.
- Manufacturing, which fell in Los Angeles from 9.7 percent to
7.0 percent.
- Health care and social assistance, which fell in Los Angeles
from 19.4 percent to 15.7 percent.
- Public administration, which fell in California from 58.1
percent to 52.1 percent and across the nation from 33.3 percent to
31.9 percent.
Wholesale and retail trade posted the only significant increase
in unionization rates over the prior year. Statewide, the
industry's unionization rate went from 8.7 percent to 10.6 percent,
a development that left researchers scratching their heads.
"This is probably due to the fact that there are fewer workers
in this industry, and often, the first jobs to go are non-union,
which would increase the proportion of union workers overall,"
Appelbaum said.
In keeping with a recession that has hit male workers harder
than female workers, evidence continued to mount of a "mancession."
Both locally and statewide, male unionization rates lost ground to
female unionization rates. Male rates in Los Angeles dropped from
17.4 percent in 2008 to 16.0 percent in 2009 and
in California from 17.9 percent to 17.1 percent.
The proportion of Latino workers who are unionized also dropped,
falling in Los Angeles from 16.2 percent last year to 12.9 percent
this year. In fact, Latino workers traded places with workers of
Asian ancestry in 2009, becoming the least unionized
ethnic group in Los Angeles, the state and the nation.
"In the long term, Latino unionization has increased greatly,"
Tilly said. "It's one of the great success stories of the Los
Angeles labor movement. But short-term changes are driven very much
by what's happening in the industries that attract workers of
specific ethnicities. Latinos are concentrated in construction,
which is getting hammered in Los Angeles, and I suspect that
industry's woes are taking a toll on overall unionization rates
among Latinos. If and when we see a recovery in California, I would
expect the long-term trend to resume."
Unionization rates remained higher for workers with more
education. Workers with a college degree have the highest
unionization rate in the nation, at 14.1 percent. In California and
Los Angeles, workers with some college education, as well as those
with a college degree, have higher unionization rates than those
with less education.
"The stereotypical union member is a blue-collar worker, but
increasingly, that's not as true," Appelbaum said. "Public sector
workers tend to be more highly educated, and there's a higher
unionization rate in the public sector."
Union membership carries significant benefits, the report found.
Unionized workers earned more per hour, on average, than their
non-union counterparts in Los Angeles ($5 more), California ($4.50)
and the nation ($4.30).
As in the past, Sacramento boasted the state's highest
unionization rate, followed by the San Francisco Bay Area, Los
Angeles, Fresno and San Diego.
Moving forward, union jobs will remain vulnerable as state and
local governments across the nation continue to grapple with
dramatic budget shortfalls, the report predicts.
"States are currently short $121 billion, and the gap in state
budgets is expected to rise to $140 billion by the end of the
2010 fiscal year," Appelbaum said. "Unless the federal
government provides the states with money to balance budgets,
services will continue to be cut, and workers are going to continue
to be laid off from jobs that are highly unionized."
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