I recently read this article by Hamilton Nolan on how union density dropped from 10.9% in 2020 to 9.9% in 2024. Nolan writes that unions and the labor movement “squandered the Biden years”, and I really couldn’t agree more.
As you might be able to tell from some of my clients, I love the labor movement. I truly think that organized labor is one of the only ways forward for the left, that we are capable of making and have made truly incredible change both in the workplace and beyond, and that we have historically been one of the most successful ways of organizing in the U.S. But I also think that the labor movement has room to grow and has so much potential to be better than it is now.
The union representation rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics represents the percentage of workers currently represented by a union, while the union membership rate represents the percentage of workers who are currently dues paying members of a union. Groups like the Economic Policy Institute use the union representation rate of 11.1% in their analysis of the current state of unions in the U.S., as it does represent the economic effects of unions better than the membership rate. But in my opinion, the success of the labor movement is not reflected in the representation rate, but in the membership rate, because the success of the labor movement relies on people being bought in. Right now less than 10% of Americans are both represented by a union and are bought in, and this number is sure to drop over the next four years. Both the union representation and membership rates cover both private and public sector workers, but rates vary widely between the two. The private sector membership rate is just 5.9%, while the public sector has a 32.2% membership rate. As Trump continues to illegally fire hundreds of thousands of federal employees, some of those employees will end up in the private sector, moving from a union job to a nonunion job, and this will undoubtedly decrease overall union representation and membership rates.
What does that mean, really, logistically for labor? It means that we don’t have enough people paying into the organizing of new workplaces. It means that not enough workers are paying attention when their union tries to do political education. It means that practicing true solidarity is even harder.
Unfortunately, because Trump is in the Oval Office, and has completely frozen the National Labor Relations Board, labor is once again, and more than ever before, on the defensive for the next 4 years. But we can’t let this take our eye off of the long term goal, that shining beacon in the distance: building power among the working class. This is going to require heavy investment in new organizing, and new organizing requires money. In 2022, the AFL-CIO announced that they were investing $11 million more per year in new organizing, but as you can see in the chart below, that number isn’t even the highest in a decade, it still represents a decrease since 2017. New organizing is in a serious state of underfunding.
Image: Labor's Net Assets Rise by $3.5 billion in 2021 while AFL-CIO Pledges "Unparalleled Investment" in Organizing, Chris Bohner, Radish Research, 2022
New organizing also requires organizers, but it seems in recent years that unions are spending more and more on management roles and cutting lower level staff. I’m not here to say that we need to get rid of vital management positions, especially folks who supervise and develop more green staff, including organizers. What I am saying is that managerial positions should not be growing in number while lower level staff, including the people doing the organizing, are being cut. These organizers aren’t just unionizing new workplaces, they’re also doing the representation of currently unionized workplaces. These are the people who help bring members in, develop them into member leaders, and sign them up to pay dues, which is key to sustaining the union. Organizing is in a critical state of understaffing.
AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler called the money being spent on new organizing an "unparalleled investment” in the labor movement and union organizing. I’m not sure I agree with that analysis of the spending, but I do know that we need an unparalleled investment in the labor movement.
Labor has made huge advancements and won big many times in the last 40 years. We’ve won new workplace protections, new union organizing campaigns, passed pro-labor laws, and successfully worked to have the NLRB recognize the collective bargaining rights of different groups of workers never before recognized. But the reality is that since 1983, union membership in the U.S. has gone from 20.1% to just 9.9%.
The leadership of the labor movement needs to look around and realize that what they’re doing isn’t working. Will that really not happen because they don’t want to admit that they’ve been wrong all this time? Will we continue to be stymied by tactics rendered ineffective by this new service based economy, by the crumbling of the middle class, by increased globalization?
We need to take this leap together. We need to collectively decide that this work is worth taking risks for: spending a lot of money on new organizing, doing more disruptive direct actions, increasing investment in political education, and bringing as many more people into this movement as we can. It’s not an option. We innovate our organizing, or we don’t survive.
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