Union Membership Plummets in Wisconsin

Written By: Brian Sikma  |  Posted: Thursday, June 28th, 2012

Unions in Wisconsin are no longer delivering enough value to their members to cause members to voluntarily stay with the union. Union membership in public sector unions in the state has plunged since Governor Walker and legislative conservatives enacted collective bargaining reform last year. According to a front-page story in today's Wall Street Journal, 34,073 AFSCME members left the union in Wisconsin over the past year. The paper notes that most of that decline came from state workers deciding they no longer wanted to pay union dues.

            A provision of the Walker law that eliminated automatic dues collection hurt union membership. When a public-sector contract expires the state now stops collecting dues from the affected workers' paychecks unless they say they want the dues taken out, said Peter Davis, general counsel of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.

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