ABC: Record 88 percent of US construction industry does not belong to a union

According to 2022 data from the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) annual Union Members Summary, the percentage of construction industry wage and salary workers belonging to unions dropped to a record low of 11.7 percent. This is a decline from 12.6 percent in 2021.

An Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) analysis found that a historically high 88.3 percent of the U.S. construction industry workforce—7.652 million people—did not belong to a union in 2022. Additionally, ABC found that there has never been a smaller percentage of union members in the construction industry since the BLS began tracking this data in 1973.

“Year-over-year construction industry union membership dropped despite robust overall job growth, suggesting that construction industry workers are not enthusiastic about joining a union when given a choice to do so,” says Ben Brubeck, ABC’s vice president of regulatory, labor and state affairs. “This illustrates why the Biden administration should not continue to advance controversial policies specific to the construction industry that require its workers to join a union and/or pay union dues, as well as contribute [to] union benefits plans, as a condition of employment on a taxpayer-funded federal construction project.”

Brubeck says an example of this can be found in President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14063, which requires federal agencies to mandate project labor agreements (PLAs) on federal construction projects of $35 million or more.

This, alongside other policies promoting PLAs on federally assisted state and local government infrastructure projects, is expected to result in more infrastructure jobs for unionized contractors and more jobs for union members at the expense of taxpayers and the 88.3 percent of the U.S. construction workforce that freely chooses not to join a union, he adds.

According to ABC, research has found that PLA mandates increase the cost of construction by 12-20 percent and result in the confiscation of 34 percent of a nonunion construction worker’s compensation package unless they join a union and become vested in union plans.

“Instead of encouraging unions to improve their product and value proposition to employees, contractors and developers, President Biden continues to implement administrative and regulatory actions favoring unions––and push legislation such as the [Protecting the Right to Organize] Act––in an effort to increase union membership, which is in historical decline,” Brubeck says.

Construction unions lost 5,000 members over the past year, decreasing from 1.024 million members in 2021 to 1.019 million members in 2022. This is despite the fact that the construction industry grew by 514,000 workers, from 8.157 million in 2021 to 8.671 million in 2022.