The changing face of organized labor [View all]

[YoungDemCA]

The following publication notes the demographic changes in the unionized workforce in the U.S. from 1983 to 2008. A couple of excerpts:

snip:

In 1983, the majority (51.7 percent) of all union workers was white men; by 2008, white men were only 38.1 percent of the unionized workforce. In the most recent data, white women were the second largest group (31.0 percent) of union workers, followed by Latino men (7.4 percent), black women (6.6 percent), black men (6.4 percent), Latino women (4.8 percent), Asian Pacific American men (2.2 percent), and Asian Pacific American women (2.3 percent).

The groups whose share in the unionized workforce increased most over the last quarter century were white women (up 4.6 percentage points), Latino men (up 3.6 percentage points), and Latino women (up 2.8 percentage points). From 1989, when consistent data on Asian Pacific Americanworkers became available, to 2008, the share of APA women increased 1.2 percentage points and APA men’s share rose 0.9 percentage points. The change from 1983 to 2008 for African American women was smaller (up 0.7 percentage points) and for African American men was negative (down 1.4 percentage points). The only group that experienced a large drop in their share in the labor movement was white men (down 13.6 percentage points).

snip:

Unionized workers have much more formal education today than they did in the early 1980s. In 1983, union workers were slightly less educated than the overall workforce. By 2008, union workers were slightly more educated than the overall workforce.

In 2008, 37.5 percent of union workers had a four-year college degree or more. Unionized women, a group that includes an important share of teachers and nurses, were even more likely (49.4 percent) to have a four-year college degree or more. (See Figure 10A.) Union men were substantially less likely (27.7 percent) to have a four-year college degree or more. (See Figure 10B.) The largest groups of union workers are those with some college but no four-year degree (28.9 percent in 2008) or a high school diploma (28.7 percent). In 2008, only 4.9 percent of union workers had less than a high school education, compared to 9.4 percent of all workers in 2008 and to 18.3 percent of union workers with less than a high school diploma in 1983.

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/changing-face-of-labor-2009-11.pdf