The Associated Press reports that the decline in union membership appears to have finally ended, holding at 12.5% of the workforce.
Union membership was about a third of the work force a half-century ago, and was one in five, 20 percent, in 1983, when the Labor Department started keeping such data.
The department said 15.7 million workers were union members in 2005. Blacks were more likely than whites, Hispanics or Asian workers to be members of a union. Men were more likely than women to be in unions and those in the public sector were four times as likely as those in the private sector to be in unions.
Full-time workers who were union members had median weekly earnings of $801, compared with a median weekly income of $622 for workers who were not in unions.