Union Membership In Massachusetts: See Recent Trends

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

Union membership in the Bay State was 12 percent in 2020, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics from earlier this year shows. That’s approximately 357,000 Massachusetts employees who were members of unions when the data was taken.

That’s down from Massachusetts union numbers in 2019. About 406,000 were union members that year. But the percent belonging to unions, 12 percent, was level — there were significantly more workers overall in 2019 than in 2020.

Massachusetts union membership is slightly 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 Massachusetts, 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 26,000, about 0.8 percent of workers in the state.

Among New England states, Massachusetts is in the middle of the pack. Union membership is lower in the Bay State than in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine but higher than in New Hampshire and Vermont. Over 17 percent of Connecticut and Rhode Island workers are union members, versus fewer than 1 in 10 New Hampshirites.

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. Massachusetts is not among them.

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.