Jarrett Skorup Vice President for Marketing and Communications for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy joined the America’s Work Force Union Podcast to talk about the five-year anniversary of the Janus Decision and its impact on union membership nationwide. Skorup also discussed how to collect union membership data accurately, and why union popularity remains high while membership decreases.
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy is a free-market think tank, with a focus on policy in Michigan. Over the last decade, labor issues have been a growing study subject for the Center. In 2018, just before the announcement of the Janus Decision, Skorup and his team began collecting data to track the decision's impact on unions. The Janus Decision ruled that forcing non-members to pay dues was illegal, and would allow any public sector employee to opt out of paying dues to the union.
There are two main ways that union membership numbers are normally collected. The first method, used mainly by news organizations, is to use the most recent survey to pull numbers. Unfortunately, due to the vagueness of the survey questions, these numbers are not accurate. The second method is to collect the data from self-reported reports in the union’s file. For the purposes of this study, these numbers were also deemed too inaccurate, he said. This forced Skorup and his team to take a new approach, filing public record requests with every public sector union employer to find detailed information on the number of employees paying dues, not paying dues or not part of the union.
With the contentious political environment over the last five years, Skorup believes many people chose not to join the unions due to political affiliations. Since the decision, unions that focused on improving their workers' standing at the negotiating table faired better at maintaining their members than those who didn’t. Additionally, Skorup added that they found 5 percent of the decrease in membership was due to automatic opt-outs that occurred immediately after the decision. The Center plans to continue this tracking every year and provide insights into any changes in the labor movement.
Listen to the entire episode to learn more.