Government Union Membership At Record Lows

Washington, D.C. – Sometime after the war in Vietnam began to wind down and Richard Nixon entered the White House, American workers began to notice with increasing alarm that the American labor movement's leadership was taking positions more and more at odds with their interests.

Slowly, the rank and file rebelled. They changed the way they voted and often voted with their feet, relocating to states with open labor markets and at-will hiring practices. As a result, union membership began to decline steadily across every part of the workforce the public sector.

Now it too appears to be in decline according to a report issued by the Freedom Foundation examining the impact of the United States Supreme Court's landmark decision in Janus v. AFSCME on public sector union membership.

In Janus, the court declared that forcing a government worker to join a labor organization as a condition of employment was a violation of their rights under the U.S. Constitution.

“We've crunched the numbers,” the group said when releasing the report and, according to official data, the four largest government employee unions – AFSCME, the SEIU, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers – “have lost a combined 733,745 – or 10 percent – of their members.”

This decline, the report says, puts the members of some of the nation's many public employee unions at historic lows. That's bad news for Democrats, who depend on the loyalty and partisan leanings of the unions and their leaders to win elections.

Government workers, studies have repeatedly shown, are among the party's biggest block of supporters because the Democrats are the party of government. This, critics point out, is the source of an inherent conflict of interest in the negotiation of labor contracts and setting benefits. “If the people sitting on one side of the table,” it has been said, “are put and kept in office by the people on the other side of the table, how can anyone say ‘No' to any demand, no matter how unreasonable or out of line with what is happening in the private sector?”

This conflict was one of the reasons President Franklin Roosevelt, who made the Wagner Act into law with a stroke of his pen in 1935 that established organized labor as a permanent and protected part of the American workforce, opposed giving collective bargaining rights to government employees.

The group also states that while “the strong pre-COVID economy and post-pandemic fire hose of federal dollars flowing to state and local governments have helped unions extract more money from their remaining members, inflation-adjusted revenue is also down significantly.”

That means these unions will have fewer dollars to spend on partisan and political issue campaigns than they have in recent years. Nonetheless, they remain, the report says, “among the most politically potent—and partisan—special interests in the country.”

Among its findings:

• The NEA reported 2,463,076 working members as of August 2022, down 7.6 percent from August 2017.
• The AFT reported 1,192,252 working members in its last report in June 2022, down 9.5 percent from June 2017.
• AFT membership is now at its lowest level since 2014.
• AFSCME reported 1,051,671 members as of Dec. 31, 2022, a decline of 16.3 percent from its last report before the Janus decision was handed down.
• AFSCME's membership is now at the lowest on record. If recent trends continue, it could drop below one million members by the end of 2023.
• SEIU reported 1,790,376 members, a decline of 10.1 percent and the fewest working members the union has reported since 2006.
• In absolute dollars, SEIU's revenue fell 29 percent from $281 million in 2017 to $199 million in 2022, adjusted for inflation.

“While the pressures on government budgets brought on by the Great Recession and the passage of collective bargaining reforms by states like Wisconsin reversed the unions' growth trends in the early 2010s, membership generally stabilized in the years preceding Janus, but steadily declined thereafter,” the report says, projecting the declines will continue for some time to come.

The report, Janus v. AFSCME at five: Government union membership at record lows, was issued to mark the 5^th anniversary of the decision in Janus.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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