U.S. Dept. of Labor Union Wages

Why would anyone want to bust a union? Obviously so they can pay the employee less.
The figures speak for themselves. Keep reading, the punch line is at the bottom. "They say Unions are dying. Why would anyone rush out to say "I want to earn less". Because Unions have been painted as the devil, denying good wages to everyone else. The truth of the matter is that you have to consider the source. Republicans, Wall to Wall mart, big employers with a vested interest in keeping wages low.

Union Members Summary

     USDL 07-0113

    Thursday, January 25, 2007

                          UNION MEMBERS IN 2006
The bold italics are my comments. Narsbars

To be fair there is information stating union membership has declined.

Why would membership decline with the facts shown here? Part of the reason
is George Bush, who has taken the right of unionionization from thousand of
Federal workers.

 --Workers in the public sector had a union membership rate nearly five times that
of private sector employees.                                  

The union membership rate for government workers (36.2 percent) was substantially
higher than for private industry workers (7.4 percent).

Within the public sector, local government workers had the highest union membership
rate, 41.9 percent.  This group includes several heavily unionized occupations, such
as teachers, police officers, and fire fighters.

Among major private industries, transportation and utilities had the highest union
membership rate, at 23.2 percent, followed by construction (13.0 percent).  Within
the information industry, telecommunications had a 20.7 percent union membership
rate.  Financial activities had the lowest unionization rate in 2006--1.9 percent.

                                     - 2 -

Union Representation of Nonmembers

   About 1.5 million wage and salary workers were represented by a union on their
main job in 2006, while not being union members themselves.  (See table 1.)  Slightly
more than half of these workers were employed in government.  (See table 3.)

Earnings

In 2006, full-time wage and salary workers who were union members
had median usual weekly earnings of $833, compared with a median
of $642 for wage and salary workers who were not represented by
unions.

Do you think they could afford to pay fair share from the difference?