Are unions dying? Not exactly. Union membership has fallen to 10 percent of American workers, down from roughly 33 percent in the mid-1940s, but public approval sits at 68 percent, election petitions filed with the National Labor Relations Board have more than doubled since 2021, and private-sector union coverage grew by 227,000 workers in 2025. The honest answer is that unions are smaller than they used to be, nearly absent from large parts of the private sector, and at the same time drawing new energy from industries that had almost no union presence a decade ago.
The Numbers Behind the Decline
Union density, the share of wage and salary workers who belong to a union, was 10.0 percent in 2025 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.1BLS.gov. Union Members – 2025 When BLS first collected comparable data in 1983, the rate was 20.1 percent and 17.7 million workers carried union cards. Researchers estimate the peak came in 1945, when roughly a third of American workers were organized and wartime production gave labor extraordinary leverage.
The percentage drop overstates how much the movement has shrunk in absolute terms. Millions of Americans still belong to unions. What has changed is the denominator: the American workforce has grown far faster than union rolls, especially in industries where unions have little presence. Private-sector union coverage actually grew by 227,000 workers in 2025, but that gain barely moved the overall density figure.2Economic Policy Institute. Workers’ Resolve Drives Increase in Unionization in 2025
The Public-Private Split
One number explains most of what people get wrong about unions today. In 2025, 32.9 percent of government employees belonged to a union, compared with just 5.9 percent in the private sector.1BLS.gov. Union Members – 2025 A public employee is more than five times as likely to be a union member as someone working for a private company.
Teachers, firefighters, police officers, and government administrative staff account for most of that strength. These workplaces don’t face the competitive market pressure that shapes private employers, and they have institutional union roots stretching back decades. Strip out government workers and organized labor’s footprint in the private economy is small enough that the “dying” framing starts to feel accurate for that half of the picture.
Signs of New Life
At the same time, something unexpected has been happening in sectors where unions had barely registered. The NLRB received 3,286 union election petitions in fiscal year 2024, up 27 percent from the prior year and more than double the 1,638 petitions filed in fiscal year 2021.3National Labor Relations Board. Union Petitions Filed with NLRB Double Since FY 2021, Up 27% Since FY 2023 High-profile campaigns at coffee chains, fulfillment centers, and tech companies started grabbing attention around 2021 and haven’t slowed.
Work stoppages have climbed with them. BLS recorded 30 major work stoppages beginning in 2025, each involving at least 1,000 workers.4Bureau of Labor Statistics. Major Work Stoppages in 2025 Public opinion has backed the trend: Gallup put union approval at 68 percent in 2025, near multi-decade highs.5Gallup News. Labor Union Approval Relatively Steady at 68% in U.S.
The sectors driving these gains reflect today’s economy rather than the old manufacturing base. Health care and social assistance, retail trade, educational services, and construction all posted meaningful increases in union coverage in 2025.2Economic Policy Institute. Workers’ Resolve Drives Increase in Unionization in 2025 Much of the activity is coming from younger workers who coordinate campaigns through social media rather than traditional union halls.
The Legal Headwinds
Federal law gives private-sector workers the right to organize and bargain collectively through the National Labor Relations Act.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC Ch. 7 – Labor-Management Relations But Section 14(b) of the same law allows states to prohibit mandatory union membership or dues as a condition of employment.7Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 U.S. Code 164 – Construction of Provisions Twenty-six states have enacted these right-to-work laws, which force unions to represent every worker in a bargaining unit whether or not that worker pays dues. The financial strain is straightforward: unions cover the cost of negotiating and enforcing contracts for members and non-members alike.
The Supreme Court delivered a parallel hit to public-sector unions in 2018. In Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, the Court held that collecting fees from nonconsenting public-sector employees violated the First Amendment, overruling decades of precedent.8Supreme Court of the United States. Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, et al. Before Janus, many public-sector unions could charge non-members an “agency fee” covering the cost of collective bargaining. After the ruling, no public-sector union anywhere in the country can collect money from a worker who hasn’t affirmatively opted in. The decision effectively extended right-to-work rules to every public workplace in the country.
Running the other direction, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, reintroduced as H.R. 20 in the 119th Congress, would let unions override state right-to-work laws through collective bargaining agreements, ban employers from permanently replacing striking workers, impose personal liability on corporate officers who commit labor violations, and require mediation when a newly certified union cannot reach a first contract within a year. The bill has not been enacted, but it maps the legislative wish list of today’s labor movement.
Why Winning an Election Isn’t Enough
A union election win is only the beginning, and the gap between certification and a signed first contract is where many campaigns stall. Government agencies don’t track this systematically, but research studies consistently find that the average time to reach a first contract exceeds 465 days. In the most recent data available, covering 2020 through 2022, the average stretched past 500 days. More than half of newly certified unions still don’t have a contract after a full year, and roughly 40 percent remain without one after two years.
Federal law prohibits employers from firing, demoting, or otherwise punishing workers for union activity.9National Labor Relations Board. Discriminating Against Employees Because of Their Union Activities or Sympathies In November 2024, the NLRB added to those protections by ruling in Amazon.com Services LLC that mandatory “captive audience” anti-union meetings are unlawful.10National Labor Relations Board. Board Rules Captive-Audience Meetings Unlawful The practical problem is speed. NLRB cases often take months or years to resolve, and by then an organizing drive may have lost momentum. That enforcement gap is one reason the PRO Act proposes giving the Board authority to seek immediate injunctions to reinstate fired workers while cases are pending.
The Gig Economy Problem
The shift from manufacturing to services and app-based work has changed the math for organizers. Factory floors concentrated thousands of workers doing similar jobs in one place. The modern economy scatters workers across delivery routes, home offices, and platforms where coworkers may never meet.
There’s a deeper legal obstacle for platform workers. The NLRA protects employees, and that word does real work. Workers classified as independent contractors fall outside the Act entirely, so if you drive for a rideshare platform or deliver food through an app as a 1099 contractor, federal labor law does not guarantee your right to bargain collectively.11Federal Register. Employee or Independent Contractor Status Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, Family and Medical Leave Act, and Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act Misclassification makes it worse: workers who function as employees in every practical sense sometimes get labeled contractors specifically to keep labor protections from attaching.12U.S. Department of Labor. Misclassification of Employees as Independent Contractors Under the Fair Labor Standards Act
Automation layers on more pressure. Warehousing, food service, and transportation all have union history, and all are seeing jobs restructured or replaced by technology, often in ways that make existing contracts and organizing playbooks fit poorly.
What Union Membership Is Worth
The financial case for membership shows up in the earnings data. Full-time union members earned median weekly wages of $1,404 in 2025, while nonunion workers earned $1,174. Nonunion workers took home only 84 percent of what their unionized counterparts made.1BLS.gov. Union Members – 2025 Over a year, the gap is roughly $11,960 in gross earnings, and that figure leaves out benefits like employer-paid health insurance and pensions, where union contracts often widen the advantage further.
Dues are the trade-off. They vary by union and industry but commonly run between 1 and 2.5 percent of gross pay, which for a worker earning $1,404 a week could mean roughly $700 to $1,800 a year. In the 26 right-to-work states, workers covered by a union contract can choose not to pay dues at all while still receiving the contract’s benefits, which eases the individual cost calculation and squeezes union budgets at the same time.
So are unions dying? The answer depends on where you look. In the private sector outside of government work, union coverage is thin and the legal environment is unfriendly. In public employment, in health care, in retail, and among workers under 35, the trend lines point the other way. The movement is contracting and expanding at once, and which story you tell is largely a matter of which industries and which decades you measure.