In this monthly roundup of “large-unit labor elections,” Benjamin Y. Fong from the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University recaps all National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections of 250 or more voters tallied in the previous month, in this case for May 2025. See the April 2025 roundup here.
It’s the center’s belief that if the labor movement in the United States is to be rebuilt, it is going to be through experimentation with new strategies and tactics that push against the constraints of labor law and through large-unit organizing in the hundreds and thousands. The latter concern will be at issue in this series.
Given the outsize importance of large-unit labor elections in the composition of the labor movement, there’s a good argument to be made that the overall trajectory of organized labor can be gleaned from an analysis of such elections.
What do arts faculty in New York City and bacon processing workers in Wichita, Kansas have in common? I asked ChatGPT this question, hoping for some connective thread for this article, and it spat the following back at me: “They both spend their days transforming raw material into something people either deeply savor or completely misunderstand. (And neither gets paid what they’re worth.)”
An apt parenthetical, as the answer I was coming around to was that they voted in the two largest National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections in May: one at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, and the other at Dold Foods, a bacon processing plant and Hormel subsidiary in Wichita.
According to Justin Elm, adjunct faculty at SVA…
Auteur: Benjamin Y. Fong
