WASHINGTON (AP) – Long-declining union membership leveled off last year at 12.5 percent of the work force, the Labor Department said Friday in a report labor leaders called encouraging.

Union membership was about a third of the work force a half-century ago, and was one in five, 20 percent, in 1983, when the Labor Department started keeping such data.

The department said 15.7 million workers were union members in 2005. Blacks were more likely than whites, Hispanics or Asian workers to be members of a union. Men were more likely than women to be in unions and those in the public sector were four times as likely as those in the private sector to be in unions.

Full-time workers who were union members has median weekly earnings of $801, compared with a median weekly income of $622 for workers who were not in unions.

“The good news is that the annual hemorrhaging of union membership slowed last year,” said Teamsters’ President James P. Hoffa.

The difficulties facing labor contributed to a split between the AFL-CIO, an umbrella federation of more than 50 unions, and about a half dozen unions including the Teamsters, who wanted to focus more resources on building membership.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney cited the leveling off of union membership as good news for a movement that has faced troubles.

“In a political climate that’s hostile to worker’s rights,” Sweeney said, “these numbers illustrate the extraordinary will of workers to gain a voice on the job despite enormous obstacles.”

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