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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 1, 2013)
...Union membership (From Page 1 cent), Hawaii (21.6 percent), and Wash- ington (18.5 percent). Oregon was the ninth most unionized at 15.7 percent, trailing Rhode Island (17.8), California (17.2), Michigan (16.6), and New Jer- sey (16.1). Least unionized was North Carolina, at 2.9 percent, followed by Arkansas (3.2 percent) and South Car- olina (3.3 percent). In three states, union membership dropped by more than 2 percentage points between 2011 and 2012: Indiana, Wisconsin, and Connecticut. Indiana, which passed a right-to-work law, dropped from 11.3 to 9.1 percent union- ized. Wisconsin, which passed a law gutting public sector unionization, dropped from 13.3 to 11.2 percent. Connecticut actually added bargaining AFL-CIO legislative conference postponed The Oregon AFL-CIO Legislative Conference has been postponed. The conference, scheduled for Saturday, Feb. 2, is being revamped. The state labor federation will pro- vide more information soon on a new format bringing union members to Salem to talk directly with legislative leaders. FEBRUARY 1, 2013 rights for home care workers in 2012, so its biggest-in-the-nation drop of 2.8 percentage points may be a fluke. The BLS union membership report can be considered a pretty accurate de- piction of trends at the national level, but state-level data can sometimes be misinterpreted because minor year-to- year fluctuations — particularly in less populous states — may not be statisti- cally significant. Oregon’s union density, for example, was said to have fallen steeply, from 17.1 percent unionized in 2011 to 15.7 percent in 2012, with 30,000 union members lost in 2012 — after a gain of 25,000 union members in 2011. But the data for a state like Oregon, with 1.2 percent of the nation’s population, come from about 500 Oregon households. Because one person in the survey can represent about 2,000 individuals, just 15 survey responses would account for the 30,000 union members Oregon is said to have lost. That’s not to say Ore- gon didn’t lose that many union mem- bers; it’s just that BLS doesn’t publish “confidence intervals” for state-level unionization figures. State-level shifts could be considered more reliable if they hold up over time. Oregon’s per- centage in the survey has fluctuated in the last 10 years, with a low of 13.8 per- cent in 2006 and a high of 17.1 percent in 2011. NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS PAGE 5
