"The bitter political standoff in Wisconsin over Governor Scott Walker's bid to sharply curtail collective bargaining for public-sector workers ended abruptly Wednesday night as Republican colleagues in the State Senate successfully maneuvered to adopt a bill doing just that," The New York Times reports this morning. "Democrats....condemned the move as an attack on working families, a violation of open meetings requirements....and a virtual firebomb in state that already found itself politically polarized and consumed with recall efforts, large scale protests and fury from public workers." Rallies and demonstrations continue in the state. As heated as it's been, the rhetoric over unions is fast-approaching the boiling point; Wisconsin is just the beginning. The right accuses unions, especially public sector unions, of stifling economic competitiveness and putting state economies in the red. "The bottom line is we are trying to balance our budget and there really is no room to negotiate on that because we're broke," Scott Walker told George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America. Or as Harvard economist Robert Barro wrote in the The Wall Street Journal: "Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion ....[but] collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty." On the left, unions are seen as a bulwark against falling wages and the decline of the middle class. "Collective bargaining didn't cause the economic meltdown, and crushing unions won't solve it," Paul Toner, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, protested in The Boston Globe. In a passionate defense of unions on the op ed page of The Washington Post, Yale's Jacob S. Hacker and Berkeley's Paul Pierson pointed out that unions "have resisted the rampant deregulation of financial markets and the soaring growth of executive pay. They have been one of the few organized voices that has consistently pressed back against the string of tax-cut bills for the rich that began in the late 1970s." For all the sound and fury, neither side has adduced much hard data to support their positions. While there have been many studies of the effects of unions on corporate profits and productivity, surprisingly few assess their effects on state economies. (One exception is a careful 1988 study by Harvard labor economist Richard Freeman, "Union Density and Economic Performance," which finds that union density improves earnings and income, but exacerbates unemployment and hurts growth.) But that was over twenty years ago. And so, with my colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute, I decided to take a close look at current data and trends for unions across the 50 states. For starters, there's huge variation in unionization levels across the U.S. states (see map above). Nationally, nearly 12 percent (11.9%) of workers are union members. New York touts the highest level of unionization in the nation, more than double the national rate at 24.2% percent. More than one in five workers are union members in Alaska (22.9%) and Hawaii (21.8%). Unionization tops 15 percent in an additional ten states, and it's above 10 percent in 14 more. Wisconsin ranks 17th in union membership, less than 15 percent (14.2%) of its workforce are union members. On the other side of the ledger, just 3.2 percent of North Carolina's workforce is unionized. Union members make up less than one in 20 workers in Georgia (4%), Arkansas (4%), Louisiana (4.3%), Mississippi (4.5%), Virginia and South Carolina (4.6%) and Tennessee (4.7%). While the conventional wisdom is that large numbers of workers are unionized in the Rustbelt states, that's more of a myth than reality. Less than one in five workers in Michigan (16.75%) belong to unions. The rate is 15.5% in Illinois, 14.7% in Pennsylvania, and 13.7% in Ohio.

Unionization has fallen off massively in the past fifty years or so. Part of this is doubtless due to the transformation of the American economy from one that was primarily industrial to one that is more knowledge and service based. Still the numbers are staggering (see the graph above). Nationally, the percentage of union members declined by almost 20 percentage points (17.4) from 1964 to 2010. This drop has been much more pronounced in certain states, especially the older industrial states (see the map below). Union membership fell by more than 30 percentage points in Indiana, from 40.8% to 10.9%; from 39.9% to 7.3% in New Jersey and from 36.5% to 4.6% in West Virginia. Ten additional states posted declines of 20 percent or more. Wisconsin saw its rate of union membership fall from 34 to 14 percent. And 25 others saw declines of more than ten percentage points.