WI Union Membership Shrinks Dramatically: Report

By Erik Gunn, Wisconsin Examiner

February 22, 2022

Wisconsin union membership has been cut in half over the last two decades, according to a new report released Tuesday.

Former Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10, which passed in 2011 and largely eliminated collective bargaining rights for public employees, is the single biggest reason for that decline, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, which produced the report with data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In the year 2000, more than one out of every six workers in Wisconsin was represented by a union — 17.8 percent. Wisconsin was the 10th highest state for unionization in the country.

In 2021, unions represented just 7.9 percent of the state’s workforce. Wisconsin’s rank among states for union representation fell to 28, and union membership was below the national average of 10.3 percent, the Wisconsin Policy Forum reported.

“This decline has been welcomed on the right as a win for taxpayers and economic growth and lamented on the left as a blow to workers and income equality,” the report states. “One thing both sides agree on, however, is that Wisconsin has been a leader in this national shift and these data bear that out.”

Private sector union representation has been slowly declining for decades, nationally and in Wisconsin. One reason is that two heavily unionized industry sectors, construction and manufacturing, now account for a smaller share of the state’s workforce, the report observes.

Another is that union representation within those sectors has also declined.

Wisconsin also enacted so-called Right to Work legislation in 2015 under Walker. The law prevents unions and private employers from negotiating contracts that require all represented workers to pay union dues. The report doesn’t look at what role that change might have played in the drop in private sector union representation.

But Act 10 may have had the most dramatic impact. The 2011 law ended almost all collective bargaining for all public employees except police and firefighters. It allowed negotiations only on wages and capped collectively bargained wage increases to the rate of inflation.

The law also instituted new requirements for public sector employees to maintain union representation. It requires unions to be recertified annually, and requires a 51 percent majority of all employees in a bargaining unit, including those who didn’t cast a ballot for or against the union.

Analyzing data from the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, the report found that there were 318 certified public employee unions at the end of 2021— 32.3 percent, or less than one-third, of the 983 public sector unions that attempted to recertify after Act 10 passed in 2011.

Just over one-third —33.4 percent — of the unions no longer certified failed to reach the required 51 percent recertification vote the last time they held a vote. The balance, 34.3 percent, “stopped pursuing annual recertification prior to 2021,” the report states.

Teachers’ unions have maintained the largest presence among active employee public unions, according to the report.

Local public employee unions that have opted against recertifying in the last decade have said they dropped out because of the limits to their bargaining rights. Even without certification, however, some unions have maintained a voluntary presence among the workers they previously represented.

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