The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on January 21 released its annual union membership report for 2021. This year’s report showed that union membership as a percentage of the workforce declined by half a percentage point from 10.8% to 10.3%, a drop that matches the lowest level on record set in 2019. As this blog observed about last year’s report, there is a little more to the story due to the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The 10.8% membership rate in 2020 was up from 10.3%, but it was skewed by the loss of 9.6 million jobs, most of which were non-union. Despite the rate increase that year, union membership in whole numbers dropped by 321,000. While the union membership rate in 2021 returned percentagewise to where it had been in 2019, the number of union members fell another roughly 230,000.

In other words, the addition of 4.2 million jobs in 2021 did not grow union membership, which is now down by more than half a million members in two years. Almost all those new jobs were in the private sector, and so was the decline in union membership. In 2021, the private sector lost about 50,000 union members, for a total loss of about 478,000 since 2019. Meanwhile, the private sector union membership rate itself dipped slightly from 6.3% to 6.1%, the lowest it has ever been. Its previous low point was 6.2% in 2019.

The story in the public sector was a little different but not necessarily much better. Despite losing 391,000 jobs in 2020, the...

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