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The Cost of Unions
...Unionized public sector workers have much higher average wages and benefits than nonunionized public sector workers. Bureau of Labor Statistics data in Table 2 show that union members have a 31-percent advantage in wages and a 68-percent advantage in benefits....

...This information is interesting in the context of the following chart. It shows that in 2009, for the first time ever, more public-sector employees (7.9 million) belonged to a union than did private-sector employees (7.4 million) despite there being five times more wage and salary workers in the private sector....