Is Indiana’s Right-to-Work Act adversely affecting union membership throughout the state? That seems to be the logical conclusion based upon statistics released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

According to the recently released BLS numbers, Indiana had 266,000 dues-paying union members in 2017, down from 304,000 union members in 2016. That’s a 12.5 percent decline in union membership.

Those 266,000 union members are 8.9 percent of Indiana’s total 2017 workforce. In 2016, union members were 10.4 percent of Indiana’s workforce. The Indianapolis Business Journal has more on this.

Across the country the number of union workers actually grew by 262,000 to 14.8 million in 2017, but the percentage of the total workforce that is organized remained steady at 10.7 percent last year, according to the BLS report. In 1983, the BLS statistics show, unions represented 20.1 percent of the total work force.