Hawaii leads nation in union membership

Hawaii once again led the country in union membership with 139,000 unionized workers in 2018, 23.1 percent of wage and salary workers across the islands, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday.

“Hawaii is a special place that has long been union friendly given the role that labor has played in our state’s history,” Randy Perreira, president of the Hawaii AFL-CIO, told the Honolulu Star-­Advertiser. “Labor has a proud legacy of involvement in Hawaii. We appreciate that we remain one of the most progressive states allowing workers to have a voice on the job through their unions.”

At the same time, the country overall saw 10.5 percent of wage and salary workers represented by unions in 2018, down 0.2 percent from 2017.

Hawaii’s union representation increased from 21.3 percent in 2017.

By comparison, Hawaii saw its union membership peak in 1989 at 29.9 percent, according to Richard Holden, the BLS’s assistant commissioner for regional operations.

The lowest point came in 2016 when 19.9 percent of Hawaii workers belonged to unions.

Unions played critical roles in island life before World War II — especially on the docks and in plantations. But they rose to prominence in the decades that followed as the Democratic Party dominated post-war island politics, said Neal Milner, a retired political science professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

“Our history with unions is pretty militant and fairly violent with the longshoreman strikes and plantation unions,” Milner said. “Some of the activity was critical to unions getting a foothold. It’s part of the history of Hawaii. The people in college now don’t know much about it, but their grandparents knew about highly visible strikes that changed the way people live.”

Today, private and public unions represent employees from blue-collar workers to white-collar government employees and can still influence island politics, Milner said.

“They clearly are big players that can turn out workers,” Milner said. “They’re very influential and they certainly are a factor, but they don’t control things.”

In November, striking hotel workers settled a 51-day strike that ended with new contracts that gave them increased pay and medical and pension benefits.

The strike lasted more than twice as long as the hotel workers’ strike of 1990.

“When the chips were down, they brought out people,” Milner said.

Overall, since comparable state data became available in 1989, union membership in Hawaii has ranked above the overall U.S. average, according to the BLS.

After Hawaii, New York had the next highest union membership rate in 2018, 22.3 percent; followed by Washington, 19.8 percent; Rhode Island, 17.4 percent; and Connecticut, 16 percent, according to the BLS.

The union picture on the mainland varies wildly state by state — including successful teacher union strikes, plant closures that have cost the jobs of thousands of unionized workers and isolated attempts to unionize Silicon Valley tech workers, Milner said.

Locally, he said, union membership continues to run strong among key unions — especially government employees.

“It’s virtually impossible here to get rid of public employee unions,” Milner said.