Union Membership In Illinois: See Recent Trends

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

Union membership in Illinois was at 14.3 percent in 2020, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published earlier this year. That’s approximately 739,000 employees who were members of unions when the data was collected.

That’s up from Illinois' union numbers for 2019 in terms of percentages, when 13.6 percent of Illinois workers were union. But a higher number of workers — 771,000 — were part of unions that year.

The distinction reflects higher unemployment numbers in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Illinois' unemployment rate stood at 4 percent in June 2019, compared with 14.2 percent in June 2020. In June 2021, it had dropped back down a bit, sitting at 7.2 percent.

In 2019, Illinois had more than 5.6 million total employed workers and about 500,000 fewer — 5.1 million — in 2020.

Illinois union membership is higher 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 Illinois, 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 788,000, about 15.2 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 conducted jointly with the U.S. Census Bureau.

In the 28 states that are "right-to-work states," workers don’t have to join or contribute to labor unions to benefit from the contracts negotiated by the union. Illinois is not a right-to-work state.

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 million workers from every trade in the public and private sectors of the New York economy, according to its website.