Are you a young adult confused about your economic future? You’re not alone. The president brags of surging markets and job growth, but you’re getting rejected for every job you apply for, scrambling to pay rent, and stuck in a dead-end retail job. Maybe it’s time to take inspiration from the latest stats about millennials: Workers age 35 and under are the main component of an unprecedented surge in union membership over the past two years.
Nationwide in 2017, nearly 860,000 workers under age 35 got hired, and nearly a quarter of those were union jobs. According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, “Historically, younger workers have been less likely than older workers to be a member of union,” so in that sense there’s a lot of room to grow among younger workers, whose union membership lags behind other age groups. Millennials are responsible for a huge portion of the recent gains in union representation across the workforce, which has managed to remain fairly steady (yep, young people are keeping labor alive). Growing by some 198,000 workers, youth in union jobs are offsetting loss of union jobs in older age brackets; union jobs for workers age 45 to 54 dropped by some 75,000 over the same period.