* Capitol News Illinois…

As workers in Illinois celebrate Labor Day, a new report shows there has been a surge in efforts to organize labor unions in workplaces throughout the state, while overall public approval of labor unions nationally is the highest in nearly six decades.

In 2022, there were 72 successful petitions to organize labor unions in Illinois, which represent 9,600 new unionized workers, the highest single-year numbers at any point in the last decade.

That’s according to The State of the Unions 2023, an annual report by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, a think tank with strong ties to organized labor, and the Center for Middle Class Revival at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

After decades of declining union membership and declining unionization rates, U of I’s Robert Bruno, a coauthor of the report, said those numbers may signal a resurgence in the labor movement.

* From the IEPI report…

Though the unionization rate fell nationally for the second consecutive year, the United States added union members in 2022 for the first time since 2017.

• The United States added 277,000 new union members in 2022.
• Illinois and the Chicago area both experienced small declines in unionization in 2022.
• Unionization rates both nationally and in Illinois are at their lowest levels in 10 years.

Today, Illinois’ union membership rate is about 13 percent, which is significantly higher than the national average (10 percent) and is the 12th-highest union density among the 50 U.S. states.

• Between 2013 and 2022, the unionization rate declined by 2.6 percentage points in Illinois, driven primarily by a transition from a more highly unionized manufacturing-based economy towards service- and knowledge-based sectors with low union densities.
• Despite declines in unionization over the past ten years in Illinois, there has been a recent increase in new organizing activity over the last two years, with 2022 producing more successful union petitions and newly represented workers than at any comparable time over the past decade.
• The union success rate for new organizing drives in Illinois was 56 percent in 2022. […]

Essential workers and public sector workers are more likely to be union members in Illinois.

• About half of all public sector workers are unionized (49 percent) compared to fewer than one-in-twelve private sector workers (8 percent).
• About 24,000 fewer state and local government workers are union members since the Janus Supreme Court decision, but the decrease may be attributed to labor shortages and unfilled positions.
• Unionization rates are 84 percent for police officers and firefighters, 83 percent for public pre-K through 12 teachers, and 48 percent for construction and extraction workers.

* Illinois Policy Institute…

Five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that government workers cannot be forced to fund the political agendas of union bosses. Workers are embracing that freedom, especially as the unions spend more of workers’ money on priorities other than the workers.

Over 36,000 workers since 2017 have chosen not to associate with some of the largest and most politically active government unions in Illinois, according to the unions’ own reports with the U.S. Department of Labor. […]

But the number of workers rejecting union leadership is even higher than it looks in the federal reports. […]

SEIU HCII reported just under 60,000 members and fee payers in its 2022 federal report, filed in March 2023. But on its website, it claims to represent “more than 91,000 workers” in four states.

That means at least one-third of workers represented by SEIU HCII have chosen not to be a part of the union.

* This year, Chicago has the potential to set a record for the most new union petitions since 2010. WBEZ…

* WBEZ…

“When you see [petitions] increasing, you are seeing what we would call a leading indicator that there is an increased level of support for unionization,” [Robert Bruno, professor of Labor and Employment Relations in the School of Labor Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign] said. “It also strongly suggests that there’s a lot of current organizing going on.”

The high number of new union petitions is even more powerful when combined with high success rates of union votes, Bruno explained. His research has found that most petitions for new unions are making it past the union elections, which if successful, means the union can officially enter negotiations with the employer.

In Illinois, the success rate for those elections is now about 56%, Bruno said. “Over the last decade, its range has usually been between 33% or 47%. So that’s a substantial increase.”

The higher success rate can inspire new petitions, Bruno said. “It sends a signal to other workers that you can actually successfully organize your union. … It raises confidence that voting for a union is going to generate a positive outcome.”