For four decades, a federal count of union members has been the annual physical exam for the labor movement. Did we grow or shrink, and where?
The tally just came out for 2025. At face value, the number looks better than expected, given a year of open warfare on us from CEOs who want to automate everything and a bloodthirsty federal government.
The feds asked fifteen thousand households per month whether they included a union member. Based on that survey, they estimated an additional 463,000 workers were represented by unions compared to 2024, roughly half of them in the public sector and half in the private sector.
Some 14.7 million workers were estimated to be members of unions in 2025, which is 10 percent of the workforce, narrowly up from the previous year. An additional 1.8 million were represented by a union but were not members. According to analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, nearly half the union growth was in the South.
But these headlines mask a grimmer picture. The new count doesn’t account for how, in March last year, a Trump executive order suddenly went nuclear on federal unions, commanding agencies to ignore contracts and bargaining rights for the lion’s share of federal workers, totaling nearly a million, from Department of Veterans Affairs nurses to fraud fighters.
Federal workers joined their unions at record rates to fight back, but their bosses now largely refuse to acknowledge their contracts. If a million federal workers were counted as effectively no longer having a union, 2025’s numbers would look very different.
The report also averages out job numbers across the whole year. In effect, that undercounts an additional two hundred thousand federal workers who were pressured out of their jobs or laid off by the administration’s chainsaw cuts to public programs in the final months of the year.
In the private sector in 2025, the greatest union growth happened for construction (84,000 more workers were represented by unions) and…
Auteur: Keith Brower Brown
