Union Membership in the Skilled Construction Trades, 2013-22
This report summarizes union membership rates within America’s skilled construction trades over a 10-year period from 2013 to 2022. This analysis fills an important information gap on construction union activity given shortcomings of the two most-cited sources of union data in the United States: the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual report and the site unionstats.com.
Currently, both sources provide union membership rates for the construction industry, but these totals incorporate engineers, accountants, office staff and anyone employed by a construction firm. While both sources also present union density for construction and extraction occupations, those projections include workers employed in other industries (e.g., manufacturing). What is important for construction stakeholders, however, is union membership rates within blue-collar occupations for workers employed by construction firms; these estimates are not available from either source.
To provide consistent measures, this report largely adheres to the statistical methodology used by the BLS. This means examining the results of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a nationally-representative household survey administered jointly by the BLS and Census Bureau on a monthly basis. The BLS method of estimating union membership rates effectively divides the number of people who identify as employed union members on the survey by the number of people who identify as employees (and not self-employed).