...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