In a pandemic year that hit the state job market, California’s unions have increased their labor force participation to the highest level in six years.
But in the curious world of the coronavirus economy, that gain has not gone as expected. In a historically bad job market, unions have lost far fewer workers than they cut non-union employers.
The annual accounting of the influence of labor organized by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that California unions in 2020 had 2.44 million active members. This is the largest number of members in the country, even with the state union lists falling to the minimum of seven years.
You see, the member count across the state dropped by 63,000 last year, down 2.5% and the third loss in four years. So how did the share of unions in the labor market grow across the state?
Well, the business restrictions that limit the pandemic have cut all state workers’ jobs across the state by more than triple the rate of union losses – an impressive 8.6% drop last year. This gap in job losses translated into California’s unions with 16.2% of jobs across the state last year – up from 15.2% in 2019 and the highest proportion of union workers since 2014.
Or see the trend this way: unions that have 1 in 6 jobs in California, but organized labor accounted for only 1 in 25 of job losses across the state in 2020.
Collective bargaining power probably had little to do with the superior performance of union jobs. Instead, it was more about mixing jobs and coronavirus precipitation.
Consider California’s industries most affected by the pandemic – hospitality jobs that are often not unionized workplaces. Then, consider several “essential” jobs, such as first responders, supermarket staff, nursing and logistics workers. All are strongly unionized.
This trend is not just in California. The rest of the US had 11.81 million union members last year, down 258,000 or 2.1%. Compare that to the national labor market, which lost 6.5% of its workers, and union participation jumped from 9.6% to 10.1%.
However, like many business twists in the pandemic era, union employment trends were very different during the Great Recession.
In 2009-10, California unions lost 309,000 jobs or 11% of members. Overall, the state lost jobs at a rate of 7%. The union’s share of the labor force dropped from the most recent peak from 18.4% in 2008 to 17.5% in two years.
In this broader economic meltdown in the late 2000s, job cuts abounded in heavy union industries, from construction to transportation, from factory work to government officials.
Once again, the poor performance of the unions was a national standard in that recession. US unions lost 1.07 million members in 2009-10. This 8% drop was double the total job loss of just 4%. As a result, union participation in other states dropped from 11.7% to 11.1%.
I know that the union movement is a controversial issue in the political debate related to business, locally and nationally. But politics and economics can dance at different rates, as the 2020 membership standards show us.
California had the seventh highest proportion of unionized workers among the states, with 16.2%, behind Hawaii’s number 1, with 23.7%. Both are considered “liberal” politically.
And, not surprisingly, the lowest share of the work was found in the “conservative” South Carolina, with 2.6%.
Now, see where the unions fared best: “Red” Texas had 66,000 new members last year. However, the biggest labor cuts occurred in “blue” Washington, a loss of 81,000 jobs.
Or observe last year’s changes on a percentage basis. The biggest union gain was found in the “red” North Carolina, up 27%. The biggest loss to unions was in “blue” Colorado, down 23%.
The strange swings of the pandemic in the labor market may help explain the ups and downs of work in 2020. Or perhaps the evolution of the union movement is not as politically intertwined as we might think.