U.S. union membership rate hits fresh record low in 2023 -Labor Dept

(Reuters) - U.S. union membership rates fell to a fresh record low in 2023 despite it being a year of headline-grabbing organized labor strikes from the Rustbelt to Hollywood and some continued organizing successes at companies such as Starbucks.

The union membership rate fell to 10.0% from what had already been a record-low 10.1% in 2022, the Labor Department said on Tuesday in an annual census of the U.S. organized labor landscape.

The number of union members, meanwhile, ticked higher for a second year, but the fact that overall employment among wage and salary workers rose faster resulted in a further decline in the membership rate.

The membership rate among private-sector workers was unchanged at 6%, also a record low. The rate for government workers, which is more than five times the private-sector rate, slid to 32.5%, the lowest on record, from 33.1% in 2022.

Union membership has been in steady decline since the 1970s and is now less than a third of its peak rate in the 1950s when more than 30% of workers were in a union.

That said, unions carry outsized political clout, especially in states critical to the outcome of this year's presidential race like Michigan and Pennsylvania where membership rates are higher than the national average. In Michigan, 12.8% of workers were in a union, down from 14% a year earlier, the report showed, while in Pennsylvania union membership rates bucked the trend to climb to 12.9% from 12.7%.

When United Auto Workers went on strike last year against Detroit's "Big 3" auto makers, President Joe Biden joined the picket line in Michigan, and he has repeatedly backed UAW efforts to unionize Tesla and Toyota among others.

That has yet to win him the UAW's endorsement, however, in a November election that appears on course to feature a repeat run-off between Biden, the likely Democrat nominee, and former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

Last year was the most active for organized labor walkouts in more than two decades, with 36 strikes that idled at least 1,000 workers at a time, the most since 2000, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. In addition to the UAW strikes against Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, Hollywood actors, screenwriters and directors all staged work stoppages of varying durations and thousands of hotel workers walked off the job in Los Angeles in a series of rolling strikes targeting individual properties.

(Reporting by Dan Burns; Editing by Andrea Ricci)