The share of working Californians represented by unions has held relatively steady, bucking national trends of an overall decline in union membership, according to a report released Monday by labor researchers at UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Riverside.
The report, which analyzed data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that the percentage of Californians covered by a union has hovered between 16% and 18% in the last two decades.
In 2024, the most recent year analyzed by researchers, the Golden State’s 2.67 million union-represented workers amounted to 16.3% of its labor force.
Unions have only been able to sustain those numbers through consistent new organizing, said Enrique Lopezlira, director of the Low-Wage Work Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and a co-author of the report.
“Unions are very active in California and have really tried to continue organizing workers, and that is showing up in the data,” Lopezlira said.
Successful new organizing was concentrated in the medical industry — at large hospitals — as well as at Starbucks and other snack and nonalcoholic beverage establishments, with many new members represented by the Service Employees International Union, according to the report.
For example, a drive at Sharp Metropolitan Hospital in San Diego, the second largest group of workers that filed for union representation in 2024, held a successful election covering about 2,100 workers.
Some unions, however, reported declines. United Food and Commercial Workers reported a sharp drop in employee staffing due to automation in grocery stores, the report said. And contractions in television and film production in-state has slowed, hitting below the line crew members represented by International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.
Nationwide union membership saw steep declines in the 1980s and early 1990s, brought on by automation, massive layoffs in heavily unionized industries such as automobiles and steel, the increasing success of employers’ anti-union efforts, and the sharp growth in service industries that unions had little success in organizing.
The share of all workers who were union members fell precipitously in the 1980s and 1990s.
And a gradual decline continued in recent decades, with the share of workers represented by a union nationwide dropping from 13.8% in 2004 to 11.1% in 2024, according to data analyzed in the report.
But while the U.S. overall has continued a steady decline, California and several other states have managed spurts of organizing to keep membership somewhat level since then.
There are ebbs and flows. The state’s union density numbers rose to 17.6% about five years ago, animated by successful organizing campaigns across occupations as varied as nurses, electricians, animation artists, scooter mechanics and university researchers.
Since then it has dipped by more than a percentage point, to 16.3%, but overall density has generally held , the report said.
This year, unions could face more declines, with the second Trump administration moving to hobble federal regulatory agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, and firing tens of thousands of federal workers.
