Share of unionized state residents is steady as U.S. numbers fall

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.

- BY SUHAUNA HUSSAIN

JULIANA YAMADA Los Angeles Times MCDONALD'S worker Imelda Rosales leads a rally with SEIU members in Los Angeles in February.

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 coauthor 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.