nion members are all around us. Us, meaning the staff of Alaska Business, since our offices are downstairs from a labor union, which happens to be our landlord. Every other Alaskan can look to their right, to their left, and in three other directions, and if they don’t see the union member standing next to them, then they probably are one.

That is, about one-sixth of wage and salary workers in Alaska are represented by a union, though that figure is going down.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the membership rate in 2021 was 15.8 percent, down from 17.7 percent in 2020. (The percentage of workers represented by unions, not just card-carrying, dues-paying members, dropped from 19.5 percent to 17.2 percent.) That’s still above the national average; Alaska has had higher unionization than average since the bureau began keeping records in 1989. Union affiliation peaked in 2002 at 24.4 percent and has dropped ever since.

Despite the decline, Alaska still had the 4th highest union membership rate of any state as of 2020. Only Hawaii, New York, and Rhode Island were higher. After the pandemic year, Alaska slipped behind California, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington—and just ahead of Rhode Island—for 8th place in 2021.

Whether that trend is positive or negative is left to the reader to judge. Suffice to say the decline has been somewhat steeper than the national trend, which has seen a much more gradual drop in union membership rates over the last decade.

In this month’s Alaska Trends, we look at a cross-section of unions and how they vary in size, measured by their annual revenue. See which organizations loom large and which are doing their jobs on a smaller scale.