Union Membership In Arizona: See Recent Trends

ARIZONA — The upcoming Labor Day holiday celebrates workers in Arizona, and many of them are either members of, or represented by, unions.

Union membership in Arizona was at 5.3 percent in 2020, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics from earlier this year shows. That’s approximately 155,000 employees who were members of unions when the data was taken.

That’s down from Arizona union numbers in 2019. About 174,000 were union members that year, accounting for 5.7 percent of wage and salary workers.

Arizona union membership is lower than the national average, which was 10.8 percent in 2020, according to the labor statistics bureau. The national union membership rate went up by 0.5 percent from 2019.

Unions represent even more workers in Arizona, however. Those whose jobs were covered by a union or employee association contract in 2020 even though they themselves weren’t members amounted to about 207,000, about 7.1 percent of workers in the state.

Nationally, union membership in 2020 was much more common among public sector workers, 34.8 percent, compared with those in the private sector, 6.3 percent, the labor statistics bureau found in its report, which used membership data collected as part of the monthly Current Population Survey.

In the 28 states that are “right-to-work" states, workers don’t have to join labor unions to benefit from the contracts negotiated by the union. Arizona is a right-to-work state, which means that workers here cannot be compelled to join a labor organization if they don't want to and the right not to join a union is protected by state law.

The Arizona Constitution says that workers have the "right to work or employment without membership in labor organization."

Unionization rates were the highest among workers in protective service operations (36.6 percent) and education, training and library occupations (35.9 percent). Hawaii and New York had the highest union membership rates in 2019 and 2020, the report found. South Carolina and North Carolina had the two lowest rates both years.

It was the Central Labor Union in New York City that started the first Monday of September holiday in 1882. Nearly 140 years later, the New York City Central Labor Council represents about 1.3 workers from every trade in the public and private sectors of the New York economy, according to its website.

Democratic U.S. Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, both from Arizona, are under pressure to oppose a piece of pro-organized labor legislation that would kill Arizona's "right-to-work" law, according to the Arizona Mirror.

Kelly and Sinema are two of three Democrats who have not endorsed the bill.