(Crossposted at the Change to Win blog, CtW Connect)
Remember how I told you a year ago that 2007 had seen the first increase in U.S. union membership since 1983?
Well, America's workers haven't been sitting still since then. And new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that their hard work is paying off.
Get the good news after the jump...
The numbers for 2008 are in and they show another year of growth for the movement:
The percentage of American workers belonging to a union jumped in 2008, the first statistically significant increase in the figure in the 25 years that it has been reported.
In 2008, union members represented 12.4 percent of employed workers, up from 12.1 percent a year earlier, according to a report from Bureau of Labor Statistics issued this morning. Until last year, union membership had generally been in a slow and steady decline since the 1950s.
The key words this year are "statistically significant". The reported growth for 2007, while encouraging, was small enough that it could have been just statistical "noise" — false readings caused by imprecision in measuring. This year’s results, while not huge, are too big to be outside the margin of error.
We all still have a lot of work ahead of us to rebuild the power of workers in the United States; in 1983, the first year reliable data on union membership were collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 20% of American workers belonged to a union, which puts a move from 12.1% to 12.4% into perspective. But every journey starts with a single step forward, and this is definitely one of those.
The next step, of course, is for Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and restore workers’ right to organize free of fear, so that they can take their destinies into their own hands. That would make these first small steps the start of something big indeed.