Union Membership in the United States, 1973–1981

This paper reports estimates of union membership gathered from May Current Population Surveys, from 1973 to 1981. The authors present data by occupation, industry, selected states and SMSAs, race, gender, and educational attainment. The paper both extends and differs from that by Freeman and Medoff, which presents unionism estimates for the private sector for 1968–75. To facilitate longitudinal analysis, this paper reports three-year moving averages of occupational and industry data and annual estimates of demographic classifications. The data include public sector as well as private sector workers, and they exclude workers not covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Also, the authors provide only union-membership estimates, not estimates on workers covered by union contracts. This paper suggests that the percentage of all workers that are unionized in the United States remained fairly constant over the 1973–81 period.