In this monthly roundup on “large-unit labor elections,” Benjamin Y. Fong from the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University will recap all National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections of 250 or more voters tallied in the previous month, in this case for February 2025. See the January 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 overall 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.
There were 122 National Labor Relations Board representation elections run in February 2025, and ten involved units of 250 or more eligible voters. Those ten elections, however, involved 74 percent of all eligible voters that month.
The highest-profile election was the loss at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Garner, North Carolina, which my colleague Jonathan Rosenblum covers well here. Jonathan and I offer some more in-depth thoughts on what recent news in the world of Amazon organizing means in a recent article in these pages, but in brief: it’s going to be very difficult to make much headway with this company with traditional site-by-site organizing methods. Amazon is too big and too flexible for such organizing, and the company is only going to come to the table if the flow of goods through their dynamic…
Auteur: Benjamin Y. Fong
