New Jersey union membership is a bit stronger as a percentage of the total population than it was immediately before the pandemic, Save Jerseyans, but the state’s union labor force is still a mere shadow of what it was in the mid-20th century (or even 20 years ago).
In 2020, the Garden State was home to approximately 600,000 union members according to federal data. That’s around 16.1% of the total workforce, and a slight increase from 15.7% in2019 and 14.9% in 2018, but most of the rate change can be explained by the pandemic-induced drop in overall employment as opposed to actual raw labor membership gains. Membership dropped by 368,000 male workers in 2020 while female membership remained steady.
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“Over half of the 14.3 million union members in the U.S. lived in just seven states (California, 2.4 million; New York, 1.7 million; Illinois and Pennsylvania, 0.7 million each; and Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio, 0.6 million each),” explained the analysts at BLS.gov. “However, these states accounted for about one-third of wage and salary employment nationally.”
In 1964, nearly 40% (39.4%) of New Jersey’s workforce was union.
By 2020, that rate had collapsed to 20.9%.
National union membership is down to about 1 in 10 workers.
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