Union membership in California (a labout market roughly half the size of the UK) has risen by over 100,000 in the last year. This is recession-busting stuff, given that unemployment in the state hit 11.9% in July.

In fact, California unions gained 131,206 new members from July 2008 to June 2009 (up from 2.7 million according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics – a climb of 5%). The proportion of Californian workers belonging to unions has also risen, according to a study by UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. In fact over the last two years, union density in California has increased by an eighth, from 16.1% to 18.3%.

Interestingly, California has a public sector density rate now of 57.4% -basically the same as in the UK, and way ahead of the US average of 37%. But private sector unionisation is only 10.6% compared with 7.5% across the USA (and 16.6% in the UK – using UK government statistics for 2006 which is all I have to hand – it hasn’t changed dramatically since then).

Source: Union membership climbs in California, by Carolyn Jones, San Francisco Chronicle, 7 September – hat tip to John Logan, UC Berkeley for alerting me.

Posted on September 7th, 2009 by Owen Tudor filed under: Global solidarity, Union organising