Labor

In These Tmes -  Union membership ticked up last year, with an overall gain of more than 400,000 workers, and a slight increase in the percentage of workers who have a union, to ten percent. The percentage of unionized working people in the private sector held steady at 5.9%, according to the new Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) survey. That remains a 100-year low. 

The bump in the numbers is welcome news, but union membership statistics tell us only so much about what’s really happening with the U.S. labor movement. There are promising developments rumbling through unions and other worker justice organizations that the BLS union survey doesn’t capture. Here are five that stand out. 

Northwest Labor Press - For decades, strikes were unheard of at Kaiser Permanente, the heavily unionized health maintenance organization that invested in a highly touted partnership with its unions. Now, increasingly, strikes are back, and so are dark warnings from union leaders about the decisions coming out of the executive suite.

A case in point: The U.S. Department of Justice announced Jan. 14 that Kaiser Permanente will pay $556 million to settle claims that it defrauded Medicare in California and Colorado to the tune of about $1 billion over a period of 10 years.