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February 2, 2018 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
Union membership holds steady in 2017
America’s union membership
rate held steady in 2017, the
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
reported Jan. 19: 10.7 percent of
wage and salary workers were
union members, the same as
2016. Union members were 6.5
percent private-sector workers
and 34.4 percent of public-sec-
tor.
With the work force growing,
the hold-steady percentage
meant 262,000 more union
members: 14.8 million alto-
gether, 7.2 million in the public
sector and 7.6 million workers
in the private sector. Another 1.6
million workers were covered
by a union contract but were not
members, a situation that’s more
common in right-to-work states,
or with “fair share” paying non-
members in the public sector.
Workers belonging to unions
in Oregon edged up by 34,000,
to 262,000, according to the
BLS report. In Washington
state, union membership grew
by 45,000 from the previous
year, to 584,000.
BY THE NUMBERS
U.S. workers in a union 10.7%
Public-sector workers in a union 34.4%
Private-sector workers in a union 6.5%
Total U.S. union members 14.8 million
Public sector union members 7.2 million
Private sector union members 7.6 million
The data also show:
■ Gender: Union membership rates are still
slightly higher among men than women
(11.4 to 10 percent.) but the gap has
narrowed considerably since 1983, when
rates for men and women were 24.7 and
14.6 percent.
■ Race: Union membership rates are
slightly higher among Black workers (12.6
percent) than White (10.6 percent),
Hispanic (9.3 percent), or Asian (8.9
percent) workers.
■ Age: Union membership rates continued
to be highest among workers ages 45 to
64, 13.2 - 13.5 percent, compared with
4.7 percent of workers age 16-24, and 9.4
percent of those 25 to 34.
Average weekly earnings for
union members were 26 percent
higher than for nonunion work-
ers ($1,041 versus $829). Some
of that difference comes from
the fact that union members
tend to be older, work at larger
firms, and are concentrated in
high-wage geographic regions,
industries and occupations.
New York continued to have
the highest union membership
rate (23.8 percent), followed by
Hawaii (21.3), Washington
(18.8) and Alaska (18.1). Ore-
gon was number 12, with 14.9
percent unionized. California
had 15.5 percent.
South Carolina continued to
have the lowest (2.6 percent)
followed by North Carolina (3.4
percent) and Utah (3.9 percent).
Idaho, with 4.8 percent, was 9th
lowest.
Within the public sector, the
union membership rate was
highest in local government
(40.1 percent), which employs
many workers in heavily union-
ized occupations, such as teach-
ers, police officers, and firefight-
ers.
Private-sector industries with
high unionization rates included
utilities (23.0 percent), trans-
portation and warehousing (17.3
percent), telecommunications
(16.1 percent), and construction
(14.0 percent).
Industries with the lowest
unionization rates were finance
(1.1 percent), food services and
drinking places (1.4 percent),
and professional and technical
services (1.7 percent).
The figures are come from a
monthly survey conducted by
the U.S. Census Bureau of about
60,000 households that asks for
information on employment
among the nation's civilian non-
institutional population age 16
and over. The union data are tab-
ulated from one quarter of the
sample and are limited to wage
and salary workers (self-em-
ployed workers are excluded).
... Hammond: Beating back barriers of race and gender
From Page 1
“When I walk on the job site,
before they see my gender, they
see my skin color,” Hammond
said.
Hammond was following in
the footsteps of Charlene “Char-
lie” Molden, who had blazed the
trail as the first black woman to
become an inside electrical
wireman at Local 48.
“So I’d show up at the job
site, and here’s what I’d hear:
‘God damn it, here comes Char-
lie.’ And I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m not
Charlie.’ And I’d hear, ‘Oh shit,
another one.”
“You’ve got to remember:
This is 1979. There haven’t
been women. There haven’t
been black women.”
As her first year drew to a
close, she was working on a
construction project building a
warehouse at Port of Portland
Terminal 5 when the journey-
man she was assigned to work
with came to her and with a
guilty look, said, “I can’t do
what they want me to do.”
“What’s that?” Hammond
asked.
Almost 40 years later, she re-
members his reply: “They told
me you had a bad attitude, that
IN HER OWN WORDS IBEW Local 48 Business Representative Donna Hammond
joins Portland State University professor Roberta Hunte for a presentation and dis-
cussion about race sponsored by the University of Oregon Labor Education and Re-
search Center (LERC). Hammond will talk about how she overcame racial and gen-
der barriers in the labor movement. Hunte will talk about her research on women
in the trades and present her short film, “Sista in the Brotherhood” about the
experience of a black woman Carpenter apprentice on a construction job site.
■ Thursday, Feb. 8, 6 to 8:30 p.m., White Stag Building 70 N.W. Couch St., Portland.
your attendance was poor, you
couldn’t follow instructions, and
had a very poor work ethic. But
everything that I’ve asked you
to do, you’ve been able to per-
form. If I lay you off, you’ll be
dismissed from the program. I
can’t do what they want me to
do.”
He didn’t. He kept her on. It
would be one of many times
someone gave her a chance, even
when someone else wouldn’t.
Brush with death
On job sites working with elec-
tricity, there were times when a
bit of racially-tinged paranoia
could be a survival skill.
Hammond will never forget
the time as a two-year apprentice
she was working at a paper mill
in Newberg, and a foreman as-
signed her and the black male
journeyman she was working
with to remove an electric trans-
former from a water-filled mud-
hole, on the double, and told
them it was de-energized.
The journeyman, Omar
Shabazz, told her never to trust
anyone’s say-so, and said they’d
better check to see if there was
current. She did. It was live.
Backing away from the electri-
fied transformer, she looked up
and saw a crowd of white hats
looking down at her from a cat-
walk. (Foremen tended to wear
white construction hats).
“Was this the Klan standing
up there? They were watching to
see what would happen as we
were getting ready to get blown
up. … If had touched it, I would
not be sitting here today. We
would have been electrocuted
immediately.”
Hammond is convinced they
Turn to Page 9
LIVE WIRE: Donna Hammond at work as an IBEW Local 48 electrical appren-
tice in the late 1970s.