Black Union Members

In 2010, the union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who weremembers of a union--was 11.9 percent, down from 12.3 percent a year earlier, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers be-longing to unions declined by 612,000 to 14.7 million. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers. Black workers were more likely to be union members than were white, Asian, or Hispanic workers.