Bucking the national trend of declining union membership, the number of workers in New York state belonging to unions edged up to a five-year high last year.
Nearly one quarter of New York workers (24.6 percent) were union members in 2014, the highest membership rate in the U.S., according to a news release issued by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Thursday.
Meanwhile, the percentagepercentage of workers belonging to unions nationally fell to 11.1 percent last year. That’s the lowest percentage since the BLS started collecting the data in 1983.
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New York had nearly 2 million union members in 2014, while the U.S. had 14.6 million.
Another 101,000 workers in New York had jobs represented by unions, so 25.8 percent of all New York workers either belong to unions or are represented by them.