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January 29, 2025 What's Trending

Union membership rises in CT, hits new low nationally 

JESSIKA HARKAY / CT MIRROR CSCU faculty union members and students rally outside the building where the Board of Regents meets over funding on June 12, 2024.
By Greg Bordonaro

Union membership in the U.S. hit a new low in 2024, but Connecticut is bucking the national trend as organized labor continues to show a post-pandemic resurgence in the state, new federal data shows. 

Nationally, the percentage of wage and salary workers who were union members in 2024 was 9.9%, down slightly from 10% in 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That’s well below the U.S.’ peak 20.3% union membership rate in 1983, the first year the data was made available. Overall, 14 million U.S. workers were in unions last year out of a labor force of 145 million people. 

Conversely, the number of Connecticut workers in unions rose for a fourth straight year in 2024. 

There were 269,000 union members in Connecticut in 2024, up 5.5% from 2023, BLS data shows.  

 

In 2024, 16.5% of the state’s 1.634 million employed residents were union members, while 17.8% were represented by unions, BLS data shows. That was up from 15.9% and 16.9%, respectively, in 2023.

 

Last year’s increase came as several high-profile unionization efforts played out in the state. 

Baristas at several Connecticut Starbucks voted to unionize, and staff at Hearst Connecticut Media Group, the state’s largest newspaper publisher, announced plans to form a union. 

Connecticut has the fourth-highest union membership rate behind Hawaii (26.5%), New York (20.6%) and Alaska (17.7%).

Nationally, the union membership rate of public-sector workers (32.2%) continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (5.9%), according to BLS. 

The highest unionization rates were among workers in education, training and library occupations (32.3%), and protective service occupations (29.6%). 

Men continued to have a higher union membership rate (10.2%) than women (9.5%), BLS said.


 

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