After bottoming out at 4% in 2017, labor union membership in Arizona has been slowly rising, but it is still well behind levels of previous years and only about half of the national average.
In 2021, the most recent year for which Bureau of Labor Statistics data is available, it said 5.4% of workers in Arizona were represented by a union, or 167,000 of the 3.1 million workers in the state. That compares to a national union membership rate of 10.3% for the same year.
“The most obvious disconnection is that the process for actually organizing and getting recognition for unions is extraordinarily onerous,” said Michael McQuarrie, director of Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy. A Gallup survey ahead of Labor Day reported that 71% of Americans approve of labor unions, up slightly from 68% last year and the highest since 1965. The telephone poll of 1,006 people was taken from Aug. 1-23 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
“Over the years, labor law has become weakened, and hasn’t kept up with the times. And so as a result, it is very difficult for workers to, to join in or … freely express that they want to get in,” he said. In a Washington, D.C. forum Thursday, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said the labor movement has been “working hard for the past 30, 40 years,” but with a tight labor market and wages that have not kept up with the cost of living, she expects more workers to step forward.
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