Construction Workers Continue to Flee Unions

By Dominic Pino | Originally posted on nationalreview.com

One of the common misconceptions about organized labor in the United States is that it is the province of blue-collar workers in male-dominated fields. The “hard hats” voting for Nixon is still a part of the conventional wisdom about union membership, even though it is woefully out of date.

According to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of U.S. union members work for the government. The private sector union membership rate is 5.9 percent, the lowest on record. And even in industries some might think of as union-heavy, the union membership rate is still quite low. For example, only 7.8 percent of manufacturing workers and 10.3 percent of construction workers are union members.

Researchers at unionstats.com broke down the BLS data for private construction workers by state. They found that at least 90 percent of construction workers are not union members in 29 states. That total has increased from 24 states four years ago. Just like in the U.S. economy as a whole, union membership in the construction industry is declining.

Associated Builders and Contractors, a construction-industry trade association, made this map of the state-level data:

Red corresponds to states that have a construction workforce less unionized than the national average. Blue corresponds to states that have a construction workforce more unionized than the national average.

The rates vary significantly between states, which is not what you’d expect if you believe there’s something unique about the construction industry that predisposes it to unionization. And with a few exceptions, such as Ohio and Missouri (which is not right-to-work and might have had more nonunion construction workers if they were guaranteed the choice), Republican states tend to have less unionized construction sectors than Democratic states.

In many of the major states that voted for Trump in 2024, it’s hard to find a unionized construction worker:

95.7 percent of Tennessee construction workers aren’t union members.
96.4 percent of Arizona construction workers aren’t union members.
97.9 percent of Texas construction workers aren’t union members.
98.3 percent of Georgia construction workers aren’t union members.
98.4 percent of Florida construction workers aren’t union members.
98.5 percent of North Carolina construction workers aren’t union members.

Trump shouldn’t jettison decades of pro-worker Republican labor policy, because that would be a bad idea regardless of politics. Doing so to appease an imaginary mass of construction workers would be especially tragic.

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