Last year, US unions cautiously celebrated a turnaround in their organizing fortunes. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election win rates had reached 79 percent, and the number of workers organized for the year approached one hundred thousand, the highest number since 2009.
Yet these gains masked a harsher reality for labor, even before the disastrous 2024 elections. For the labor movement to grow, it needs to organize millions of workers each year, not one hundred thousand. Organizing continues to lag in fast-growing, low-density sectors such as personal services, IT, finance, and health care, while union-heavy sectors like government and manufacturing keep shedding jobs.
Many organizing victories of the last few years — including landmark wins at Amazon, Starbucks, REI, and Trader Joe’s — have yet to yield first contracts, as employers refuse to bargain and some go so far as to challenge the legitimacy of the NLRB.
And things have only gotten harder since Donald Trump began his second term, dismantling the regulatory state, detaining and deporting immigrant workers, and stripping a million federal workers of collective bargaining rights.
Starting around the time of the first Trump administration, many unions responded to the increasingly challenging organizing environment by shifting to campaigns for smaller bargaining units in firms and industries less central to the global economy, where unions had more leverage to restrain the employer’s anti-union campaign.
The proportion of union elections has increased in customer-facing industries…
Auteur: Kate Bronfenbrenner
