VIRGINIA – Labor Day celebrates workers in Virginia, and many of them are either union members or union representatives.
Union membership in Virginia was 4.4 percent in 2020, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics earlier this year. That is approximately 164,000 Virginia employees who were union members at the time the data was collected.
That is more than the Virginia union numbers in 2019. About 156,000 were union members that year, or 4 percent of wage earners.
Union membership in Virginia is below the national average, which was 10.8 percent in 2020, according to the Labor Statistics Bureau. The membership quota of the national trade unions rose by 0.5 percent compared to 2019.
However, unions represent even more workers in Virginia. Those whose jobs were covered by a trade union or works cooperative agreement in 2020 even though they were not members themselves amounted to about 201,000, which is about 5.4 percent of the workforce in the country.
In the District of Columbia, union membership was 8.6 percent in 2020, down from 9.3 percent the previous year. That corresponds to 30,000 members in the district.
DC union membership is below the national average, which was 10.8 percent in 2020
At the national level, union membership in 2020 was much more common among public sector workers at 34.8 percent than in the private sector at 6.3 percent survey.
In the 28 right-to-work states, including Virginia, workers do not have to join a union to benefit from union-negotiated contracts.
The union formation rate was highest among workers in security service companies (36.6 percent) and in education, training and library professions (35.9 percent). Hawaii and New York had the highest union membership in 2019 and 2020, according to the report. South Carolina and North Carolina had the two lowest rates in both years.
It was the Central Labor Union in New York City that began on the first Monday of the September break in 1882. Almost 140 years later, the New York City Central Labor Council represents approximately 1.3 workers from all sectors in the public and private sectors of the New York economy, according to its website.
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