Week 14 — Workers, Not Everyone: Reading the Union Membership Figures — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 13 of the term — read the Bureau of Labor Statistics' union figures for 1983 and 2025, work out what they say, and explain to someone outside sociology why a rate of workers is not a share of everyone.

This week you learned how the economy is organized into sectors, how capitalism, socialism, and mixed economies differ, how work is changing, how power differs from authority, and how two models read who holds power. In Week 2 you learned to read any statistic four ways and to keep percentage points separate from percent, and in Week 1 you learned to compare by rate rather than count; this week you use those habits on four decades of union membership. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain a finding to someone who has never studied sociology. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Sociology in Action Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

You will use these figures, all from this week's chapter:

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Union Members release: 10.0% of wage and salary workers were union members in 2025, which was 14.7 million people. In 1983, the first year with comparable data, the rate was 20.1%, and there were 17.7 million members. The rate is a share of wage and salary workers, not of all people.
• The same release: in 2025 the public-sector union membership rate was 32.9% and the private-sector rate was 5.9%.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. Union members were 20.1% of U.S. wage and salary workers in 1983 and 10.0% in 2025. By how many percentage points did the rate fall?
2. There were 17.7 million union members in 1983 and 14.7 million in 2025. By how many million did the count of members fall?
3. In 2025, 14.7 million union members were 10.0% of U.S. wage and salary workers. About how many million wage and salary workers were there in 2025?
4. In 2025 the public-sector union membership rate was 32.9% and the private-sector rate was 5.9%. How many percentage points apart were the two rates?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation of what that value shows and one limit of it. For problem 1, say what the rate counts and whom it describes, and explain why the 10.0% is not a share of all people. For problem 2, explain why the count fell by much less than the rate did, and say whether the figures show a correlation, a cause, or neither. For problem 3, say who the wage and salary workers are and name two groups of people who sit outside that base, including where an independent contractor fits. For problem 4, explain what the gap between the two sector rates shows that the overall 10.0% hides, and say what the figures cannot tell you about why the rates differ.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your neighbor drives a city bus and belongs to a union. She reads a headline: "Unions are fading: only one worker in ten belongs." She asks whether that means her union is unusual and whether unions are disappearing. Write a 3–5 sentence message to your neighbor that explains in everyday words what the one-in-ten figure counts and what it does not, mentions the public-sector and private-sector rates and where her own job fits, says that the figures describe a fall without explaining it, and names one limit of the figures. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one accurate message can be defensible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend who hears that only 15% of the homes in an illustrative town still have a landline phone and asks whether the town's phone company is about to close. Model answer: "Not necessarily. The 15% is a share of homes that kept a landline, not a count of the company's customers, so it says nothing about how many people buy mobile or internet service from the same company. It describes how many homes kept the old service, not why the others dropped it. The limit is that one share cannot show you the whole business."

Use that pattern for your message to your neighbor, with your own explanation and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single data-reading report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and a brief interpretation of what that value shows and one limit of it;
• your message to your neighbor, explaining what the one-in-ten figure counts and does not, mentioning the two sector rates and where her job fits, saying the figures describe a fall without explaining it, and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled diagram of the union figures with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's numbers, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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