State of the Unions

Good run-down of the state the labor movement here:

Union membership went up 139,000 workers to 14,244,000, but the overall workforce grew more, so the union membership rate dropped from 10.1% to 10.0%. The rate for the private sector is even lower at 6.0%, the same as last year. The public sector rate also fell a bit, but remains much higher at 32.5%. Union membership increases were primarily accounted for by workers of color and young workers. The numbers for all union represented workers, which also include workers who choose to not be union members but are covered by the union contract, are slightly higher for all these.

Particularly alarming is that union membership is concentrated in so few states. Almost half of all union members are in just six states (CA, NY, PA, IL, NJ, OH), and 11 states have union membership rates less than 5% (AZ, FL, GA, ID, LA, NC, SC, SD, TX, UT, VA). The labor movement has a very small presence in too many states, which has dire ramifications for political progress, as we’ll discuss later.

Overall, these are really disappointing numbers, especially because the last year saw some exciting organizing and strike activity, which we’ll discuss more. Below is the union density for the last century, and we see this latest decrease just continues a long term trend. Indeed, since 1965, union density has risen only four times from one year to the next, and fallen in forty-five.

There is some OK news though:

The U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) released its annual summary of private sector union elections for fiscal year 2023, which covers the year from October 2022 through September 2023. I previously analyzed this data here, but will summarize the main findings.

There’s a lot of good news here. The number of elections increased 5% from 1,249 the year before, to 1,316 this past year. The number of union election wins rose 11%, and the union win rate surged from 72% last year to an excellent 76% this year. Unions have been getting better at winning elections and after many years of running fewer elections, are starting to run more of them.

Moreover, the last two years have seen an increase in the number of workers who won their election, with a 66% increase last year, from 47,350 to 78,750. The number of workers organized in NLRB elections last year is the highest in decades, due to growing union win rate and an increase in the average winning bargaining unit size over time. 

As for strikes, meh:

For 2023, BLS reports that there were 33 large work stoppages that started that year, involving 458,900 workers. This is a big increase from 23 work stoppages and 120,600 workers the year before. BLS states that this is the largest number of annual worker stoppages since the 39 in 2000. Since 1986, only one year (2018) had a higher number of workers involved.

The number of large strikes has increased in recent years, as many of us have been excited about a renewed “strike wave.” However, these recent numbers should be seen in context. In the 1950s through 1970s, there were hundreds of large strikes every year, and in more recent years, it’s usually just dozens. 

For all the labor world likes to promote itself–see the “hot labor summer” rhetoric a few months back, at best the labor movement continues to tread water. It’s true that nominal public support for unions is quite high right now, but that hasn’t made much of a difference in actual success. I’d also note that in addition to most union organizing efforts being in the same few states, that the move of the labor movement’s organizing from the working class to the educated/professional class, while fine because you win where you can, doesn’t exactly mean much good if unions begin to be seen as some elite lib thing too by working class people. However, for those of you (i.e., most of the commenters here who comment on labor posts) who think that the only value of labor movements is whether they deliver voters for Democrats, let me remind you that they do:

However, the small union presence in many states means that elected officials there face no political consequences when voting against worker and union interests. Many major progressive political goals will be difficult if not impossible to achieve without a larger labor movement. And this problem is intertwined with the alarming growth of an authoritarian political culture. While it’s true that a problematic 40% of folks from union households were Trump voters in the 2020 election, unions have always been one of the best vehicles for worker political education and participation. Studies have shown that union membership shifts white workers’ racial attitudes in a more progressive direction, since a multi-racial union gives workers from different racial backgrounds the opportunity to fight together in solidarity. Indeed, a contributing reason for the movement of some of the white working class toward more conservative politics is the decline of unions.

In short, if you supported Clintonian neoliberalism, you are partly responsible for the position we find ourselves into today, which very much includes Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Jerry Brown, and basically an entire generation of Democratic leaders, with a few exceptions (Harkin, Gephardt, and most notably Joe Biden). Then we can extend it to Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and so many from the 2000s and 2010s. All those Democrats who didn’t realize that their meal ticket to winning wasn’t billionaires, it was unions. Sigh.