US manufacturing has gone down the drain, and with it, it seems, the entire labor movement. Just 16 percent of the work force now, down from 20–25 percent ten years ago. Maybe it will drop to 12. Once it drops to 10, it might as well keep dropping to zero.

-Thomas Geoghegan, 1991, Which Side Are You On?

Each January, union activists and observers get treated to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) annual union membership report. It’s a bird’s-eye view of the state of the US labor movement, by the numbers, by industry, by state. The sobering results of this year’s report, released on Friday, are somewhat predictable even if the particulars are somewhat unreliable (the state-level data seems particularly noisy, with the Texas AFL saying it doesn’t trust the figures and Maine’s numbers telegraphing a probably much-exaggerated 32 percent drop in membership). Simply put, the union movement continued its decades-long trend of decline.

Union density has been falling since the 1950s, and in absolute numbers since the 1980s, despite continued population (and job) growth. At its peak, around one in three US workers were union members; that number is now one in ten. In 1979, there were around twenty-one million workers with union cards; there are now around fourteen million.