Union Membership In Rhode Island: See Recent Trends

PROVIDENCE, RI — The upcoming Labor Day holiday celebrates workers in Rhode Island, and many of them are either members of, or represented by, unions.

Union membership in Rhode Island was at 17.8 percent in 2020, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics from earlier this year shows. That’s approximately 81,000 of 455,000 Rhode Island employees who were members of unions when the data was taken.

That's pretty much the same as Rhode Island's union numbers for 2019. About 83,000 employees were union members that year, accounting for 17.4 percent of wage and salary workers.

Rhode Island 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 Ocean State workers, 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 87,000, or about 19.1 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. Rhode Island is not included in the list.

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.