Labor Day and organized labor are inseparable.

The holiday grew out of the labor movement of the late 19th century, when labor activists pushed for a national holiday recognizing the contributions workers made to the country. The first Labor Day celebration was held in New York City in 1882, and Congress made the first Monday in September a federal holiday in 1894.

So when unions, elected officials and others recognize organized labor on Labor Day, there is plenty of history behind it.

But there is another number worth remembering today:

About 9 in 10 American wage and salary workers are not union members.

According to the latest annual data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14.7 million wage and salary workers belonged to unions in 2025.

That represented 10.0% of the nation's wage and salary workforce.

Another 1.8 million workers did not belong to a union themselves but worked in jobs covered by a union contract. Altogether, 16.5 million workers, or 11.2%, were represented by unions.

That distinction matters.

Saying 90% of wage and salary workers are not union members is accurate. If we instead count everyone represented by a union, including nonmembers covered by a union agreement, the share outside union representation is about 88.8%.

Either way, the large majority of American employees work outside organized labor.

And that is considerably different from several decades ago.

In 1983, the first year for which BLS has comparable figures, 20.1% of wage and salary workers belonged to unions. In 2025, that figure was 10.0%.

Pennsylvania remains somewhat more unionized than the country overall.

BLS estimated that 620,000 Pennsylvania workers belonged to unions in 2025, representing 10.9% of the state's 5.68 million wage and salary workers.

That leaves approximately 5.06 million Pennsylvania wage and salary workers who were not union members.

When workers who were represented by unions but were not members are included, union representation reached 11.7% in Pennsylvania.

BLS cautions that state-level union estimates are based on smaller samples and should be interpreted broadly. The 2025 estimates also exclude October because Current Population Survey data were not collected during the federal government shutdown.

One of the largest differences in the American workforce appears when public and private employees are separated.

In 2025:

BLS notes that local government includes many heavily unionized occupations, including teachers, police officers and firefighters.

The actual number of union members in the two sectors was remarkably close.

There were approximately 7.3 million union members working in the public sector and 7.4 million in the private sector.

But the workforces themselves are not close in size.

BLS counted approximately 124.6 million private-sector wage and salary workers in 2025 compared with 22.1 million public-sector workers. In other words, roughly 85% of the wage and salary workers included in these figures worked in the private sector.

That helps explain an unusual feature of today's workforce: roughly half of America's union members work in government, even though government employees represent a much smaller share of workers overall.

There is another part of the picture that deserves to be included.

Among full-time wage and salary workers in 2025, union members had median weekly earnings of $1,404. Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings of $1,174.

But BLS itself cautions against interpreting that $230 difference as a simple union wage premium.

Union and nonunion workers are distributed differently across occupations, industries, geographic areas, ages and employer sizes. The figures do not control for those differences.

In other words, the numbers tell us what the two groups earned. They do not, by themselves, tell us how much of the difference was caused by union membership.

There are similar cautions when comparing government and private-sector workers.

Among full-time workers in the 2025 union-membership data, median weekly earnings were $1,302 in the public sector and $1,181 in the private sector.

Hours worked were quite similar.

Among wage and salary workers who were at work during the survey reference week in 2025, private-industry employees averaged 38.3 hours, while government employees averaged 39.0 hours.

Compensation beyond the paycheck differs more substantially.

The latest available BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data, covering March 2026, estimated that employers spent an average of $46.60 per hour worked on private-industry employees. State and local government compensation averaged $66.41 per hour.

For private workers, that included $32.60 in wages and salaries and $14.01 in benefits.

For state and local government workers, it included $40.82 in wages and salaries and $25.59 in benefits.

The particularly large difference in benefits includes retirement and health costs. State and local government employers averaged $8.83 per employee hour for retirement and savings benefits alone in March.

But those figures should not be read as evidence that a government employee doing the same job earns 43% more than a private employee.

They are averages across two very different workforces. Government employment contains a different mix of occupations, education levels and compensation arrangements, and the BLS figures measure employer compensation costs, not the amount deposited into an employee's paycheck.

None of these numbers diminish the role organized labor played in creating Labor Day or the role unions continue to play for millions of workers.

In fact, the numbers help explain why organized labor remains such a visible part of the holiday. Nearly one-third of public-sector workers belong to unions, millions of private-sector workers do as well, and union members continue to earn higher median weekly wages on a broad, unadjusted basis.

But Labor Day's purpose is broader.

The U.S. Department of Labor describes it as an annual celebration of the social and economic achievements of American workers.

Today, that includes workers in unions and workers who are not. It includes public employees and private employees, teachers and tradespeople, nurses and restaurant workers, police officers and warehouse employees, office workers, retail employees, small business owners, the self-employed and millions of others whose work takes countless different forms.

Organized labor is an important part of that story, both historically and today.

So is the rest of the American workforce.

On Labor Day, there is room to recognize both: the labor movement that helped give America this holiday, and the millions of workers, union and nonunion alike, whose work continues to shape the country.

Labor Day belongs to all of them.

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Thank you for reading,

Corey