LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — The share of unionized workers in Kentucky ticked up in 2022, bucking the national trend, according to federal data released this month.
It marks the first increase in the state’s share of union workers in six years, though the rate is still well below the level of unionization in Kentucky prior to 2017’s right-to-work law, which prohibits mandatory union contributions in workplaces.
In 2022, 7.9% of Kentucky workers belonged to a union, up from 7.2% in 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s annual survey.
The increase coincided with a wave of union campaigns at coffee shops, book stores and other service-sector employers.
Workers at the 17-store Heine Brothers Coffee chain, for example, became the biggest single group to unionize in almost a decade in Louisville. The group of 221 baristas voted to join an affiliate of the Service Workers International Union in September.
Three local Starbucks stores also joined the nearly 300 nationwide who have organized through the Starbucks United campaign.
But it’s too soon to tell whether Kentucky’s rate of union workers bottomed in 2021, when it reached a 21-year low, said Mike Clark, an economist and director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Kentucky.
Clark noted that the coffee shop organizing is going on all over the country, yet the national rate of unionization still declined in 2022 in line with the long-term trend.
Kentucky’s uptick in 2022 may be a statistical blip, he said.
“The long term trend for Kentucky is, for the past 10 years, that we’ve generally been seeing union rates go down,” Clark said. “We are seeing that nationally as well. And so, I think we really just kind of have to watch and see whether or not this one data point turns into a new trend.”
Indiana’s rate of union workers dropped from 9% in 2021 to 7.4% in 2022, a low for the state in surveys dating to 2000.
