The effects of the Janus decision on labor unions have been significant. But will union membership in the public sector continue to decline? The state of Michigan provides a good case study of what might happen in the years to come.
Michigan passed a right-to-work law in 2012, prohibiting unions from getting workers fired for not paying them dues. The impact of the new law was gradual, as it applied only to new union contracts ratified after March 2013.
This was roughly five years before the Janus decision. Another five years have passed since the ruling. The results in Michigan may signal whether union membership nationwide will continue to decrease and how large the opt-out rate might become.
In Michigan, perhaps unique among the 50 states, all the major public sector unions submit annual financial forms to the federal government that list their membership numbers. The largest unions are roughly split between representing public and private sector workers.
This data shows that since the right-to-work law went into effect, union membership, including employees in both the private and public sectors, has declined by 143,000 in Michigan, or 26.3% overall. Further, this membership loss has come at a time when the number of jobs in most of these unionized sectors has grown.[19]
Graphic 5: Membership change in Michigan’s unions, 2012-2022
For example, the Michigan Education Association and American Federation of Teachers Michigan, the two largest teachers’ unions, have lost more than 45,000 union members combined, according to their LM-2 filings. Both of their memberships have decreased by 32%.
This decline cannot be explained by job losses in public school employment. In the 2022-23 school year, there were 213,990 full-time equivalent staff. That’s up from 196,990 FTEs in 2012-13, the school year Michigan’s right-to-work went into effect. Counting just public school teachers, the statewide total has increased from 98,608 in 2012-13 to 100,882 in 2022-23.[20]
Graphic 6: Michigan school employee union membership and school employment, 2007-2022
In other words, unions representing public school employees lost one-third of their membership during a period when the number of their potential union members — public school employees — increased. Full-time teachers are the most unionized school employees, and their numbers rose as well, albeit more modestly.
Government unions representing state employees in Michigan experienced an even sharper decline. About 5%-7% of state employees in Michigan were fee payers before Michigan became a right-to-work state, according to state data (see Graphic 3). Recall that fee payers are unionized employees who decline full union membership but are still forced to pay a fee to their union. These employees typically only make up a small minority of the workplace as there is not much to gain from opting out of full membership in a non-right-to-work state.
Michigan’s right-to-work law changed this significantly. The percentage of state employees declining union membership steadily increased after it went into effect, rising from 7.2% in 2013 to 22.4% in 2020.[21]
The Michigan Civil Service Commission — a board that regulates the employment of most state employees — passed an opt-in requirement in 2020. Workers now had to annually opt into the union operating in their workplace. In other words, employees do not join a union by default; they must regularly consent to waiving their First Amendment right established by the Janus decision. The opt-out rate for civil service workers jumped from 22.4% to 31.5% in the two years since that policy took effect, according to the latest report from the MCSC.[22]
Overall, state employee union numbers have dropped by 10,607 members since Michigan passed right-to-work. The number of state employees covered by a collective bargaining agreement has declined by more than 3,000, which explains a good chunk of that decrease. But that does not change the fact that the opt out rate has gone from 7.2% to 31.5% over the decade.
Graphic 7: Unionized state employees in Michigan, 2005-2022
In the four years since the Janus decision went into effect, the data from our public records requests show a loss of 17.4% in the number of workers financially supporting labor unions nationally. Around half of this decrease (8.4%) occurred in the first year alone, likely explained by fee payers being immediately dropped from the union rolls. But, in the three years since, unions have continued to see a steady drop in membership of 2%-3% per year.
This mirrors the drop of union membership in Michigan. Unions steadily lost members for the first four years after the state’s right-to-work law was in place, and declines continued through the following decade. This suggests that national union membership in the public sector will continue a slow but steady decline in the years to come.