State of the Unions

Organized labor has attracted a great deal of public and media attention lately, on a scale not seen for decades. The focus on “essential workers” at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with a pervasive labor shortage and widespread discontent among younger workers, have led many to turn to unions to advance their interests. Workers at high-profile companies like Amazon, Starbucks and Apple won recent union representation elections. Public support for unions has also swelled, with 68 percent of respondents to a 2021 Gallup poll indicating that they approved of labor unions, the highest level since 1965.

And yet, these developments have failed to reverse the long-term decline in organized labor’s share of the U.S. labor force, a decline that has continued steadily over recent decades—especially in the private sector where the dramatic events of the past year took place. Participation in labor unions fell to 10.6 percent in 2018 among the American workforce, with all demographic groups seeing a decline in membership. The drop continues a trend that, except for a pause during the 2008 financial crisis, has been ongoing since the 1980s, when the share of organized labor was roughly double what it is today. In their heyday in the mid-1950s, more than 30% of workers were members of a union.

The problem is one of scale. Although unions have won elections at over 200 Starbucks stores across the country, each store is of modest size, and the total number of employees affected is miniscule relative to the overall labor force. Even the 8,325 workers covered by the vote at the Staten Island warehouse comprise a tiny fraction of the nation’s labor force, which totals over 160 million workers. Moreover, the vast majority of private-sector employers— including Amazon and Starbucks— remain intransigently opposed to unionization. What will the consequences of even lower union membership be?

“Workers want unions, but a broken system is undermining their efforts to organize at every turn,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “Employers have exploited weaknesses in U.S. labor law, and federal and state policymakers have failed to prevent this from happening.”

Industry Variation in Unionization Rates

In 2021-22 more than half (54.9 percent) of all unionized workers in the United States were in three basic industry groups: educational services, health care and social assistance, and public administration. In New York City and State, those three industry groups account for an even larger share of unionized workers (58.5 percent and 60.7 percent, respectively). All three of these industry groups include large numbers of public-sector jobs (although in health care the majority of workers are employed in the private sector, as are about one-third of those in education). It is also noteworthy that, in contrast to many traditional union strongholds, all three of these industries include relatively large numbers of college educated workers.

A decline in numbers aside, unions carry outsized political clout, especially in states critical to the outcome of the presidential race like Michigan and Pennsylvania, where membership rates are higher than the national average. In Michigan, 12.8% of workers were in a union, down from 14% a year earlier, while in Pennsylvania union membership rates bucked the trend and rose to 12.9% from 12.7%.

2024 was the most active for organized labor walkouts in more than two decades, with 36 strikes that idled at least 1,000 workers at a time, the most since 2000, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. In addition to the UAW strikes, Hollywood actors, screenwriters and directors all staged work stoppages of varying durations.