More public sector employees – 7.9 million – belonged to a union than did private sector employees – 7.4 million — in 2009, despite there being five times more wage and salary workers in the private sector, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported.
About 28 percent of federal employees are union members while unions represent about 33 percent of the federal workforce. In state government the membership rate is 32 percent, while 35 percent are represented.
The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions declined by 771,000 to 15.3 million in 2009, largely reflecting the overall drop in employment due to the recession, BLS noted.
Local government workers had the highest union membership rate at 43.3 percent, reflecting highly unionized occupations such as police officers, teachers and firefighters. About 7.2 percent of the private sector workforce is unionized.