Last week, President Biden’s Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, which is led by Vice-President Harris, announced that the number of federal employees who are union members had increased by 80,000 from September 2021 to September 2022. This represents an 8% increase in the number of union members in the federal sector according to public information. Apparently using non-public information, the White House claims that this increase amounts to a whopping 20% increase.
To put this growth into perspective, if union membership in all sectors (private and public) had grown by 8% in 2022, there would have been 1.1 million additional union members. That growth would have increased the union density rate by more than 0.5%. Instead, the union density rate fell by 0.2% in 2022 because, while the number of union members increased for the first time since 2017, the number of employed workers increased at a substantially faster clip. In sum, these new federal-sector numbers represent meaningful, needle-moving union membership growth, at least in one sector.
This union membership growth begs some questions. Below are those questions and some answers.
The first question that should come to mind is, does union growth in the federal sector tell us anything about the private sector? At first glance, the answer is “no.” As an obvious starting place, the federal government under President Biden is more favorable to union membership than the forceful union avoiders (putting it politely) who are seemingly ubiquitous in private-sector management. The self-described “most pro-union president in American history” enthusiastically supports collective bargaining and tacitly encourages federal employees to join unions. President Trump undermined federal employee unions at every opportunity, so the mere fact of the transition to President Biden may explain a large portion of this recent growth of federal-employee unions.
As an obvious starting place, the federal government under President Biden is more favorable to union membership than the forceful union avoiders (putting it politely) who are seemingly ubiquitous in private-sector management.
On the other hand, the answer may be “yes.” As I explained in an earlier post, federal employee unionism is hard. In some ways, it is harder than private-sector unionism. Federal-employee unions operate in a right-to-work jurisdiction that prohibits collective bargaining over wages, benefits, and hours. Explaining the value of unions in that context is not easy, but federal employee unions do it. Unions should be able to make an even more compelling case to tens of millions of unorganized private-sector employees who live and work in non-right-to-work jurisdictions. The battle in the private sector is undeniably harder, but the rewards may be greater. Also, the battle has begun to get somewhat easier recently as the National Labor Relations Board and its worker-focused General Counsel have started to restore private-sector labor law to its role as protector of workers and their rights to organize and bargain collectively.
A second question is, can federal employee unions sustain this growth path? Here, the answer should be “yes.” The Task Force’s first report in 2021 indicated that there are more than 835,000 federal employees represented by a union, but who do not pay dues to their union. This is a consequence of operating in a right-to-work jurisdiction. Yet, this consequence also creates an opportunity. The Task Force’s latest report does not tell us how the federal-employee unions organized 80,000 new members, but it is a reasonable bet that many were recruited from among these non-dues-payers. Organizing these employees does not require an election and an expensive, contentious, and time-consuming campaign. Instead, it requires persistent persuasion and internal organizing. It likely requires retail member-to-potential-member contacts. It requires appropriate messaging. The unions obviously have already begun these efforts, but there is more room to grow. There are enough non-dues-payers left to sustain membership at this rate for another 9 years or more without organizing even one new bargaining unit. There are another 300,000+ federal employees in bargaining units who could be newly organized, if the pool of non-dues-payers ever runs dry.
A third question, perhaps interesting only to dataheads like your correspondent is, why is it this growth did not show up in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual union membership survey results? BLS’s survey showed growth of only 21,000 additional union members in 2021. There are two answers. First, the timing of the two data sources is different. BLS surveyed workers about union membership for calendar year 2021. The Task Force’s numbers came from the Office of Personnel Management, which looked at September 2021 to September 2022 (i.e., the federal government’s fiscal year). So, the two sources overlapped only with respect to data for four months and did not overlap for eight months of data. If the union growth trend began in 2021 and continued or accelerated in 2022, then this result is entirely unsurprising. Second, and more important, BLS gathers its information by surveying a sample of workers and asking them if they are union members. While this is a sound survey methodology, it involves some estimation. The OPM data comes directly from the payroll processors who forward federal employees’ dues to their unions on their behalf. In other words, the OPM count of union members involved no estimation. It is a precise and literal count, so it is more reliable.
Eighty thousand federal employees joined unions in solidarity with their co-workers. These were individual workers making a personal choice for themselves and their families.
Whenever any success occurs in the federal government, a final question inevitably arises: who should get the credit? The first two answers should be apparent to anyone familiar with worker organizing. Organizing successes begin with the workers. Eighty thousand federal employees joined unions in solidarity with their co-workers. These were individual workers making a personal choice for themselves and their families. Making that choice is not always easy, but these workers made it anyway. The unions organized the employees, so they also deserve credit. The unions offered these workers organizations that are worth joining because of their bargaining successes, their advocacy successes, their individual representation, and their democratically elected leadership, as well as the fellowship and voice in the workplace they provide.
The third and final answer may be less obvious, but credit also should be given to OPM Director Kiran Ahuja and her leadership team, and Vice-President Harris and the Task Force she leads. The Task Force and the OPM team developed a set of initiatives to make the federal government a model employer with respect to worker organizing. These initiatives ranged from increasing unions’ access and ability to communicate with employees to streamlining the process to become a dues-paying member to improving training for managers and supervisors regarding unfair labor practices and neutrality in union organizing campaigns.
The federal government should not and cannot legally organize federal employees into unions, but it can remove barriers to its employees joining unions. Because of the Task Force, it did. The result may be more union members.
