Unions are in a death spiral, and the numbers show they could nearly vanish within our lifetime. That’s not alarmism. It’s arithmetic.
Private sector union density has collapsed from about one-third of the workforce in the 1950s to just 5.9 percent in 2024. In the last twenty years, we’ve lost a quarter of private sector union density. Unions have failed to organize and win first contracts at a rate that can keep up with the growth of new jobs in the economy. As a result, union density has declined by about 0.1 percent a year over the past two decades. If nothing changes, we could fall to a mere 3.0 percent in the next thirty years, even as unions continue to win most National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections they file.
As union density has collapsed, wealth inequality has soared to levels not seen since the Great Depression, creating fertile ground for authoritarianism, right-wing nationalism, and racist scapegoating. Reversing this crisis requires nothing less than a mass, multiracial working-class movement to reclaim democracy — at the ballot box and in the workplace.
Fortunately, despite the hostile legal and political environment for unions, conditions are in many ways ripe for organizing. According to Gallup, 70 percent of Americans approve of unions and a large majority of Americans have sided with unions in their recent strikes. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimates that sixty million workers, about half of nonunion workers, would join a union today if they could. The working class has been ravaged by inflation, declining standards of living and even dropping life expectancy, and many workers are fed up and looking to fight back.
In many ways, unionization is a function of employer opposition and organizing capacity. A simple exercise in quantitative reasoning can give us a sense of how these variables interact, and of just how many workers the labor movement must organize to have a chance of pulling out of its downward spiral….
Auteur: Chris Brooks
