On March 25, 114 years ago, a New York City factory fire killed 146 workers. The dead included my Great Aunt Fannie Lansner.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire killed my paternal grandfather’s sister, a 21-year-old immigrant from Lithuania. A forewoman at the clothing factory, she died after helping coworkers escape, leaping out an eighth-floor window to escape flames and smoke overwhelming those unable to flee.
The legacy of Great Aunt Fannie and her 145 fellow victims is that their fiery deaths launched revolutions for American workplace safety, building codes and unions.
A century-plus later, I wonder what Great Aunt Fannie would think about today’s challenging job landscape, especially the nation’s labor movement.
Contemplate some high-profile union activity in recent years. For example, government jobs stats show 22 million workdays were lost to strikes in 2022-24. That sum equals the tally of the previous 17 years. Yet the recent sign of unity shown by these work stoppages couldn’t slow a long-running shrinkage of union membership.
My trusty spreadsheet, filled with numbers from UnionStats.com that track federal labor movement data, found 14.2 million union members in 2024, the second-lowest count in figures dating to 1973.
California is No. 1 for union members with 2.4 million, but that’s an 18-year low. Next comes New York at 1.7 million and Illinois at 734,800. California’s big economic rivals? Texas was No. 7 at 601,700, and Florida was No. 11 at 461,800.
The trend has clearly moved downward. Organized labor lost 321,000 members nationwide since 2019, the last year before the coronavirus upended the economy.
In 30 states, union membership shrank in these five years, with California having the biggest drop, off 124,800. Then came Washington state, off 89,900, and Florida, off 89,200.
Conversely, unions’ biggest wins of the pandemic era were in Texas, up 104,800, then Massachusetts, up 88,500, and Virginia, up 52,000.
Shrinking slices
These losses left unions with just 9.9% of all U.S. workers in 2024, the smallest slice on record.
However, union strength varies widely by state. Hawaii had the biggest union share at 27%, then New York at 21% and Alaska at 18%. California ranked No. 9 at 14%.
It was hardest to find union members in North Carolina at 2% of all workers, then South Dakota and South Carolina at 3%. Texas was No. 43 at 5%, and Florida was No. 39 at 5%.
Consider that union shares are largely shrinking – down in 28 states since 2019.
Nationally, unions’ slice of the workforce fell by 0.3 percentage points during the pandemic era. The biggest losses were in Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Washington state, off 2.9 percentage points. California’s 0.7-point dip was the 21st biggest loss. Florida’s 1.2-point slide was 16th largest.
Unions got their biggest gains in share in Hawaii, up 3.2 percentage points, Vermont, up 3.1, and Massachusetts, up 2.6. Texas’ share grew by a half-point, the 16th biggest increase.
Bottom line
The worker-boss battle is always in flux as the economy, political climates and social norms evolve.
The Triangle Fire, sadly, gave workers momentum. The pandemic briefly did the same.
What would Great Aunt Fannie say about another worker-control metric: how often people quit their jobs?
In 2022, during the pandemic’s economic unrest, a historically high 2.8% of Americans voluntarily left their job each month. Bosses fretted about how to keep their staffs from bolting.
Then the pendulum swung. That quit rate fell to 2.1% last year as bosses trimmed staffs and hiring. Workers became fearful of losing a steady paycheck.
Curiously, the frequency of telling the boss “goodbye” is not uniform across the nation – but quit rates dropped in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in two years.
In California, just 1.7% of workers quit last year, the fourth-lowest rate among the states. That’s down from the 2.4% quit rate of 2022.
Fewer quits were found only in Massachusetts (1.4% last year vs. 2.1% in 2022), New Jersey (1.6% last year vs. 2.3%), and New York (1.6% last year vs. 1.9%).
The most likely-to-quit Americans were Alaskan workers, with a 3.5% quit rate, down from 4.3% in 2022. Then came Montana (3% last year vs. 3.9%) and Wyoming (3% vs. 3.7%).
Jonathan Lansner is the business columnist for the Southern California News Group. He can be reached at jlansner@scng.com
