Journal / Essay · History

The Math of the Union

The wage-stagnation math elsewhere in this journal — pay decoupled from productivity, decades of flat real wages — has a companion trend that mostly gets left out of the chart. It's not a coincidence that both lines moved together.

And Then You're Dead · August 2026 · 6 min read

In the middle of the last century, roughly a third of the American workforce belonged to a union. That number has been falling, almost without interruption, for seven decades. The decline isn't just a labor-relations footnote — it tracks closely with the wage stagnation, thinning benefits, and retirement insecurity documented throughout the rest of this journal.

The Long Decline

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has published a consistent, comparable union membership series since 1983. Over that single, apples-to-apples window, the rate has been cut almost exactly in half.

Membership as a share of the workforce peaked even higher in the mid-1950s, when unions represented somewhere around a third of employed workers, before decades of manufacturing decline, offshoring, anti-union legislation at the state level, and employer opposition brought it down to today's level.

Who's Still In One

The remaining membership is heavily concentrated in one part of the economy, and it isn't the part most people work in.

A public-sector worker is now more than five times as likely to be union-represented as a private-sector one. For the roughly 130 million people who work in the private sector, collective bargaining is, statistically, something that happens to other people.

What a Union Card Was Worth

The wage effect of union membership is one of the most studied numbers in labor economics, and it has shrunk in step with membership itself.

In 1973, union workers earned roughly two-fifths more per hour than nonunion workers doing comparable work. By 2023, that premium had roughly halved.

Union workers are also 28.2% more likely to have employer-provided health insurance. Both numbers connect directly to two other pieces in this journal — the retirement math and the healthcare math both come out worse, on average, for the growing share of the workforce with no union behind them at the bargaining table.

And Then You're Dead

None of this proves unions are the only variable behind wage stagnation and thinning benefits — trade, automation, and policy all moved at the same time. But the correlation isn't subtle: as membership fell from a third of the workforce to one in ten, the wage premium, the pension access, and the health coverage that came bundled with a union card fell with it. Whatever replaced collective bargaining as leverage for the average worker, it hasn't replaced what collective bargaining did. That's the plan. That's the math.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

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