Chart of Union Membership by Sector 2000-2009

In my last post, State of the Unions - EFCA-Lite and the Private Sector Decline, I noted (via NYT) that 2009 was the first time that government union members outnumbered private sector union members. As a follow-up to that post, I present a chart (with table of data) of the number of union members by sector over the first decade of the 21st century:

Source: Department of Labor Bureau of Statistics Historical Data

Year	Private	Public	Total
2000	9,219,000	7,115,000	16,334,000
2001	9,148,000	7,157,000	16,305,000
2002	8,800,000	7,346,000	16,146,000
2003	8,452,000	7,324,000	15,776,000
2004	8,205,000	7,267,000	15,472,000
2005	8,255,000	7,430,000	15,685,000
2006	7,981,000	7,378,000	15,359,000
2007	8,114,000	7,557,000	15,671,000
2008	8,265,000	7,832,000	16,097,000
2009	7,431,000	7,896,000	15,327,000

A few notes:

• 2009 had the highest number of union members in the government sector (up 10.9% from 2000)
• 2009 had the lowest number of union members in the private sector (down 19.4% from 2000)
• 2009 had the lowest total number of union members (down 6.2% from 2000)

Note also that the numbers are all rounded to the nearest 1000.