Minnesota unions made membership gains in 2024, according to an annual report released last month by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nationally, union density remained about the same.
The agency’s survey results estimate that Minnesota’s labor movement welcomed about 23,000 union members last year, increasing the total number of union members to 379,000. Minnesota’s union density increased from 13.3% of the total workforce to 14.2%.
The results reflect increased organizing activity in recent years among local health care, retail, cultural and hospitality workers, as well as public-sector employees.
Minnesota-based AFSCME Council 5 recently announced that the public-service union welcomed over 5,000 new members in 2024, and the Minnesota Nurses Association said it has added 1,400 new members in the last year.
Notable organizing victories last year included workers at First Avenue’s clubs in the Twin Cities joining UNITE HERE Local 17. Front-of-house workers at two prominent Minneapolis theater companies voted to join IATSE Local 13. Grocery workers at Mississippi Market stores in St. Paul joined United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1189. And over 4,000 graduate workers in the University of Minnesota system ratified their first union contract in December.
Those gains kept Minnesota on the opposite path of its neighbor to the east.
In Wisconsin, where lawmakers have passed a right-to-work law and severely curtailed public-sector bargaining rights over the last 15 years, union density slipped by a full percentage point, to 6.4% last year.
Minnesota also outperformed the national trend.
The nation’s union membership rate was 9.9% in 2024, little changed from the prior year, and the number of workers who belong to unions fell slightly to 14.3 million.
The BLS report notes that the number of union members when it first began collecting comparable data, in 1983, was 17.7 million, and 20.1% of American workers were union members then.
But union members continued to earn more than their non-union peers in 2024. Non-union workers’ median weekly earnings were 85% of earnings reported by union workers last year, a weekly union advantage of nearly $200.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said the BLS statistics “don’t begin to tell the real story of the desire workers have to join a union,” pointing to a surge in petitions for union elections filed with the National Labor Relations Board since 2021.
Successful organizing campaigns at Starbucks, Whole Foods and Amazon – and at foreign-owned automakers like Volkswagen in the South – show Americans have an appetite for collective bargaining. But too often, Shuler said, union-busting employers exploit toothless labor laws to stifle their workers’ voice.
“There are 60 million workers who would join a union today if given the opportunity, but between broken labor law and corporate bosses like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos engaging in often illegal union-busting every year with little consequence, far too few get that chance. It’s time for change,” Shuler said, citing an AFL-CIO survey taken last year.
Unions have called on federal lawmakers to pass measures like the PRO Act that would make it easier for workers to form unions and stiffen the penalties employers face for breaking labor law.
“We call on the Trump administration to live up to its campaign promises to support workers by prioritizing fixing America’s broken labor law through the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act,” Shuler said. “These bills would finally update our archaic, broken laws and give workers what we so desperately want: a free and fair shot at joining a union on the job.”
Union Advocate 