By the numbers
Union membership in Wisconsin has continued to decline in the past two years, Census data analyzed by UnionStats.com shows.
Since the Badger Institute previously reported on this topic, public sector union membership in Wisconsin decreased 1.5 percentage points to 18.53 percent of government employees, while union membership in the private sector decreased by about 1 percentage point to 4.58 percent of employees.
Public sector union membership reached its apogee in 1999, at 57.9 percent of public sector employees, then began tailing off. After the Act 10 reforms, which ended payroll deduction of union dues and required government unions to annually hold votes about continuing to bargain for their members, membership fell by 12.9 percentage points.
Private sector union membership started from a much lower baseline, with about 20 percent of private sector employees in Wisconsin belonging to unions in 1984, the start of the UnionStats dataset. Since then, the percentage of private sector workers in unions has steadily eroded.
A recent Wisconsin Public Radio report confirms that since 2012, Wisconsin has seen the largest decline in union membership.
UnionStats is operated by three professors, Barry T. Hirsch, David A. Macpherson and William E. Even, who collected the figures from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.
| Year | Public sector membership | Private sector membership |
| 1983 | 44.58% | 19.79% |
| 1984 | 48.06% | 20.56% |
| 1985 | 47.24% | 17.76% |
| 1986 | 47.91% | 17.72% |
| 1987 | 46.23% | 16.76% |
| 1988 | 48.78% | 16.73% |
| 1989 | 47.02% | 15.83% |
| 1990 | 48.45% | 14.99% |
| 1991 | 50.36% | 14.79% |
| 1992 | 51.68% | 14.01% |
| 1993 | 51.46% | 13.38% |
| 1994 | 51.63% | 12.41% |
| 1995 | 51.90% | 11.65% |
| 1996 | 53.70% | 12.76% |
| 1997 | 56.64% | 12.42% |
| 1998 | 55.36% | 12.44% |
| 1999 | 57.88% | 11.13% |
| 2000 | 55.40% | 11.73% |
| 2001 | 50.53% | 11.26% |
| 2002 | 52.57% | 9.88% |
| 2003 | 54.39% | 9.95% |
| 2004 | 52.08% | 10.44% |
| 2005 | 49.51% | 11.06% |
| 2006 | 53.58% | 9.03% |
| 2007 | 50.95% | 8.28% |
| 2008 | 47.66% | 9.69% |
| 2009 | 53.53% | 8.27% |
| 2010 | 46.56% | 8.42% |
| 2011 | 50.31% | 7.00% |
| 2012 | 37.38% | 6.88% |
| 2013 | 35.83% | 8.16% |
| 2014 | 30.94% | 8.19% |
| 2015 | 26.11% | 5.24% |
| 2016 | 22.70% | 5.53% |
| 2017 | 18.86% | 6.74% |
| 2018 | 24.38% | 5.54% |
| 2019 | 25.68% | 5.14% |
| 2020 | 22.06% | 6.47% |
| 2021 | 21.50% | 5.69% |
| 2022 | 18.76% | 5.23% |
| 2023 | 20.10% | 5.61% |
| 2024 | 18.07% | 4.79% |
| 2025 | 18.53% | 4.58% |
Wyatt Eichholz is a policy and legislative associate at the Badger Institute.
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