“The number of employed union members has declined by 2.9 million since 1983. During the same time, the number of all wage and salary workers grew from 88.3 million to 133.7 million. Consequently, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent in 1983 and declined to 11.1 percent in 2015.”
The rate for the private sector was 6.7%, and for the public sector 35.3%. In 2017, 7.2 million employees in the public sector belonged to a union, compared
with 7.6 million workers in the private sector.