This, in turn, can give us a warped sense of reality, and cause us to react in ways that are not reflective of that reality.Īnd the reality in Maine? Union membership has indeed been declining, as the BDN piece stated, but there has not been a recent and catastrophic collapse. But the type of information we consume and interpret - even when it comes from the same government agency - matters a great deal, and can give very different impressions of what is happening. Why is any of this important? Because in economics and in politics, we use data to create our perception of the world around us, and make decisions accordingly. But the big drop in membership wasn’t between 20, but between 20, when the rate went from 12.29 percent to 10.04 percent in just a single year.Įver since then, unions have been holding between 9 percent and 10 percent every year. The share of union workers was actually 13.62 percent in the year 2000, and unions were able to maintain themselves at roughly that level all the way until 2015. Now, union membership is declining in Maine, but that erosion has been very slow and very gradual. Hardly the implosion implied by CLS data. However, where the CPS claims this number is a massive drop from just two years prior, the reality is that the share was 10.16 percent in 2020, 9.89 percent in 2018 and 10.04 percent in 2016, according to OLMS data. With the adjustment to the total workforce number cited earlier, this actually represents 9.2 percent of the Maine workforce, just as was claimed in the BDN article. Department of Labor’s Office of Labor Management Standards.Īccording to its reports, which include real reports of union membership rolls, the actual number of union workers in Maine in 2022 was 58,597, not 48,000. More importantly, though, we need to get a real sense of how many unionized workers there are yearly in Maine to see how that number has changed over time. The average number of seasonally adjusted, nonfarm workers in Maine during 2022 was 639,208, according to the CES, not the 527,000 that the CLS claims. This is what forms the backbone of the employment numbers we see reported every month, and is far more accurate than the CPS survey. Small response changes produced inaccurate numbers.įortunately, BLS publishes another, much larger survey - approximately 122,000 businesses and government agencies, rather than households - that produces what is known as Current Employment Statistics. That is exactly what happened in this case. Small statistical aberrations in the survey results can have major implications for statistical estimates and conclusions it draws. It is not genuine observational data collected by the government. It is essentially a poll, though admittedly a big one that samples roughly 60,000 individuals per month. This is a monthly survey of households by the federal government that collects information on many economic and demographic categories. To understand why, we first need to understand the underlying data used in the article, which comes from the Current Population Survey. It turns out that upon further analysis, the story is not entirely accurate. It certainly raised my eyebrow and piqued my interest, causing me to look into the issue a bit more. While union membership in the United States is at an all-time low, and has been on a slow and precipitous decline since 1954, seeing such a sharp decline over a short period of time in Maine was surprising. To many, this was alarming and unexpected.

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