From the Associated Press — Federal figures say union membership in Michigan declined in 2016. The Detroit News reports the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said the number of union members in Michigan dropped from 621,000 in 2015 to 606,000 last year, going from 15.2 percent to 14.4%. The Michigan decrease was part of a 0.4% drop in national union membership that saw the number of labor-affiliated workers in the U.S. drop from more than 14.8 million in 2015 to 14.6 million in 2016. The Labor Department said this week that there were 7.1 million public-sector employees that belonged to a union in 2016, compared with 7.4 million unionized workers in the private sector. The agency said the union membership rate for public-sector workers last year was 34.4 percent.
