A new Bloomberg BNA special report, Union Organizing in the Health Care Industry, has just been released. It covers the last seven years of labor relations trends and developments in this extremely volatile arena. As I was editing the report, I found a lot of interesting facts. Here are some of my favorites:

• While overall U.S. union membership has fallen by almost 10 million workers since 2005, union membership in the health care industry has actually risen—by more than 200,000 workers.

• The union density rate for registered nurses has risen by 15 percent in the past decade, while rates for many other occupations have gone in the opposite direction, such as for teachers (down 7 percent), janitors (down 13 percent), carpenters (down 30 percent), and truck drivers (down 33 percent).

• Health care unions won 69 percent of their National Labor Relations Board elections from 2005 through 2011, compared with 65 percent for all unions. Home health care workers fared even better, winning 72 percent of their NLRB elections.

• From 2005 through 2011, NLRB elections organized more than twice as many health care workers (131,173) as manufacturing industry workers (63,165).

• Almost 34,000 hospital workers were organized through NLRB elections in 2010 and 2011, as many as there had been in the previous four years combined.

• The states with the highest unionization rates for RNs are Hawaii, New York, and Washington. The lowest: Tennessee, Louisiana, and North Carolina.

For more information on Union Organizing in the Health Care Industry, including a look at the table of contents and overview, visit www.bna.com/healthorg.