CLEVELAND, Ohio – Union membership in Ohio inched up in 2018, defying the national trend, an annual Labor Department report shows.

About 639,000 workers in Ohio belonged to unions last year, up from 635,000 in 2016. That meant the union membership rate, at 12.6 percent, was up slightly from 12.5 percent in 2017, says the report released Jan. 18 by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Union membership in the U.S. declined slightly in 2018. About 14.7 million workers belonged to unions, or about 10.5 percent. In 2017, about 14.8 million were union members, or 10.7 percent. In 1983, the first year comparable numbers were kept, about 17.7 million workers belonged to unions, or 20.1 percent.

Harriet Applegate, who heads the Northshore AFL-CIO Federation of Labor, said she was glad union membership was up across the state. It also slightly increased in 2017. She mentioned the findings of a Gallup Poll last year, showing that 62 percent of Americans approved of labor unions, a 15-year high.

“Unions are pretty committed to organizing,” Applegate said. “I think people want respect and fair treatment – way more than money, way more than other things that have cash value.”

Being a union member, however, often does come with a higher paycheck. The report said median weekly earnings for U.S. union members workers were $1,051 versus $860 for those not represented by unions. The report said the comparison didn’t control for factors such as occupation and industry, which could account for some of the difference.

Ohio is among the states with the largest number of union members. More than half of all union members lived in: California, 2.4 million; New York, 1.9 million; Illinois, 0.8 million; Pennsylvania, 0.7 million; and Michigan, Ohio, and Washington, each with about 600,000.

This is the first union membership report since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last June that public-sector workers don’t have to contribute to unions representing them. In Janus v. AFSCME, Council 31, the court ruled that public sector unions can’t require workers, who choose not to join, to pay an agency fee to the union that still must represent them. The agency, or fair share, fee cannot be more than membership dues, which workers who join the union pay. Public-sector workers, at 33.9 percent, were five times more likely to be union members than private-sector workers at 6.7 percent, the report says.

About 722,000 Ohio workers were represented by unions in 2018, including 639,000 union members, the report said. Nationally, about 16.4 million were represented by unions in 2018, including 14.8 million union members.)

Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., said the report offers little insight into the impact of the Janus decision.

“The BLS data do not, however, provide any information on whether workers are paying fair-share fees, simply whether they are members of a union or represented by a union,” she wrote in a news release.

Applegate sees it differently.

“One of the biggest takeaways is that the Janus decision has not crippled the unions in the way everyone thought it would,” she said. “It is not like we’re home free, by any means. We’ve got unions up here (Northeast Ohio), who have reduced their per capita because they’ve lost members.

“In general, I think Janus forced the unions to do their jobs and communicate with the members, and make sure the members understand what the union is about, what the union does and how the union protects them,” Applegate said. “We’ve been doing that, and it has paid off.”