Source: Center for Economic and Policy Research.
A Nov. 2009 study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research analyzed the demographic trends of the union workforce with some surprising findings: Women make up 45 percent of union workers, Latinos and Asians are the fastest growing groups in the union movement and while Western regional membership is growing it’s minuscule in comparison to the rest of the nation.
Union workers are not distributed across the country in the same proportion as the overall workforce. Union workers are more heavily concentrated in the Northeast, Pacific, and Midwest, and underrepresented in the West and, especially, the South. In 2008, over one-fourth of all union workers were in both the Northeast (27.4 percent) and the Midwest (25.7 percent) (see Figure 17), compared to 18.6 percent of the total workforce in the Northeast and 22.8 percent of the total workforce in the Midwest (see Table 1 above). The Pacific states accounted for almost one fourth (22.7 percent) of union workers, but a substantially smaller share of the workforce (15.6 percent). Almost one-in-five union workers (18.7 percent) were in the South, but this was far smaller than the region’s share in total employment (35.9 percent). States in the West* were a much smaller share of both the unionized workforce (5.6 percent) and total employment (7.1 percent).
*The West is Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
