On October 29th, the Bureau Of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their 2014 report on Employee-Reported Workplace Injuries and Illnesses. As we were reading through, our team couldn’t help but notice that many of the states with illness and injury rates above the national average (3.2 per 100 employees) were also states with the highest union density. Thus, we began our own research using the most recent data reported by individual states to the BLS. We divided the states into quartiles based on union density and looked at how those same states ranked in workplace injuries across the U.S. Our hypothesis was confirmed – the states in the highest quartile of union density had a 25.6% higher injury rate than the states in the lowest quartile. 
