State of the U.S. Unions 2026
This is my annual roundup of labor data on union membership, elections and strikes. How is the U.S. labor movement doing in the Trump 2.0 era?
Every year several government agencies release data on the U.S. labor movement, covering union membership, elections and strikes. It’s worth looking at all of this information together to assess how unions are doing. My summary from last year is here.
Union Membership
In February the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its annual Union Member Summary report. The union membership rate (the percentage of all workers who are union members) rose slightly from 9.9% in 2024 to 10% in 2025. The rate for public-sector workers rose from 32.2% to 32.9%, and the rate for private-sector workers stayed at the much lower 5.9%. The rates for all union represented workers, which includes workers who are covered by union contracts but are not union members, is slightly higher for all these.
The number of union members increased by 410,000 to 14.67 million workers, the highest level since 2018. The number of union represented workers rose 463,000 to 16.49 million workers, the highest level since 2009. This is encouraging, but I’ll have more to say about this later on.
The BLS does caution us that their data collection was compromised by the Oct-Nov 2025 federal government shutdown. The Current Population Survey (which is where the union membership data comes from) didn’t collect data for the month of October 2025. Therefore, BLS says that, “2025 annual estimates are not strictly comparable with annual averages for other years.”
At the state level, the labor movement continues to be concentrated in too few states. About half of all union members live in just seven states (CA, NY, IL, TX, WA, PA, NJ), and 11 states have union membership rates less than 5% (AR, AZ, ID, LA, MS, NC, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT). The labor movement has a very small presence in too many states, which has dire ramifications for political progress.
Despite the slight increase in the union members and membership rate, these are really alarming numbers and represent a long term existential crisis for the labor movement. Below is a chart from last year of the union membership rate (also called union density) for the last century, and we see this latest increase just interrupts a long term downward trend. Indeed, since 1980 union density has risen only three times from one year to the next.
Union Elections
The U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) releases its annual Election Reports summary of private sector union elections for each fiscal year, which runs October through September of the next year. The data for the most recent year was delayed by the 2025 federal government shutdown, and at this time, the NLRB has still not posted the FY2025 annual report, but does have all the monthly reports. I used those reports for this analysis here, and I’ll summarize the main findings.
This data tracks the main method of private sector union organizing, so it’s worth examining. But it doesn’t give the full story, as it excludes organizing activity in the public sector, any transportation sector campaigns that are covered by the Railway Labor Act, and all organizing that happens through card check or other voluntary recognition by the employer. It also leaves out any other kind of organizing by worker centers or other groups.
The results from last year are not great but could have been worse. The chart below shows the number of elections (RC and RM types — see this analysis Methodology section for more about this data) where the case is closed and a final result is determined, and the union win rate for every year since 2001. Over the past few decades there has been a long term trend toward fewer elections and a higher win rate, as unions have concentrated their resources on fewer elections, but have been much better over time at winning them. Last year I noted the increase in elections and win rate from 2022–2024, in what looked like the beginning of a possible new organizing upsurge.
Well that has stalled over the last year, with the number of elections in 2025 dropping 14% from 1,637 to 1,406. I don’t want to overstate the decrease in elections here, as it’s still higher than the 2023 level of 1,320. Moreover, there’s good news that the union win rate stayed about the same, only dropping slightly from 77% to 76.7%.
This next chart shows the numbers of workers eligible to vote and who won their elections. Again we see the long term decline in both, and the recent upsurge from 2022–2024. In 2024 the number of workers that won their election was about 94,000, the highest in several decades. But we see a drop in 2025, with the number of winning workers declining 20% to about 75,000. Though this decrease is disappointing, it’s still higher than most years of the last few decades. Since the win rate was about the same, this drop is essentially the result of fewer elections run.
To put these numbers in historical context, they are a fraction of the number of elections that were run decades ago. A 2024 analysis showed that the amount of current NLRB election organizing compared to the size of the workforce is 1/10 the level we had in the 1970s. That decade had several years with over 8,000 elections.
Strikes
The most prominent data set for strikes is collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). It tracks large work stoppages of at least 1,000 workers for at least one shift, so it’s an incomplete picture of strike activity. A work stoppage can be a union strike or an employer lockout, but the vast majority of these are strikes.
The BLS reports for 2025 that there were 30 large work stoppages that started that year, involving 306,800 workers. This is a slight drop from 31 work stoppages the year before, but well above the average of about 21 for the last decade. This is the third highest number of annual work stoppages in the last 20 years, and the fourth highest in number of workers involved.
The number of large strikes has increased in the last three years, going over 30 in 2023 for the first time in decades, as many of us have been excited about a possible renewed “strike wave.” However, again these recent numbers should be seen in historical context. In the 1950s through 1970s, there were hundreds of large strikes every year, and in more recent years, it’s usually just dozens. Here’s the trend of the average number of annual large work stoppages and workers in each decade (with the 2020s = 2020 through 2025), and we can see the huge decrease in recent decades, starting with the collapse in the 1980s.
The best other publicly available data set on work stoppages comes from the Cornell University ILR-School Labor Action Tracker. It tracks any work stoppages that occurred during the year, no matter how many workers, so it’s a more complete picture of strike activity. It now has data for the last five years, shown in the chart below. As with BLS data, these can be either strikes or lockouts, but the vast majority are strikes. A Power at Work podcast discussion of this data is here. The rise and fall of the strike activity during this time I think likely reflects the particular conditions a few years after the COVID pandemic started, when the labor market was favorable for strikes.
So this is an average of 371 work stoppages per year. To put that in context, we can compare this with BLS data from the 1970s, when they tracked work stoppages of all sizes. On the Work Stoppages Through the Years page, BLS states, “There were 52,533 work stoppages that began in the 10 years from 1970 to 1979,” for an average of over 5,200 work stoppages per year.
How Should We Understand All This?
By any honest assessment, the labor movement is too small, not growing enough, and in crisis. At 10% of all current workers, it has become a smaller share of the workforce nearly every year for the last 70 years. The level of new union organizing is simply too low to grow the movement. We need to organize well over one million new workers every year to start increasing union density again, and we are at less than 1/10 of that. Furthermore, the main way that unions assert their power is through strikes, and the current strike levels are less than 1/10 of the 1970s level. In short, we need in increase the level of union activity by 10 times.
It’s worth mentioning that there was some excitement over the increase in union members (410,000) and union represented workers (463,000) over the last year. While any increase is welcome, much of this is the result of the natural churn in the economy, at least in the private sector. As union jobs are created and destroyed at unionized employers, sometimes the net number goes up. Much of this increase is not the result of union organizing, and we can’t rely on favorable churn to grow.
Luckily interest in unions is very high. Gallup’s annual poll has shown that union approval is at 68%, and almost half of all workers want to be in a union. That’s tens of millions of workers who need help organizing. Unions need to dramatically increase their organizing campaigns, but it’s hard to imagine ramping up this effort by the factor of ten that is needed.
Unions can and should hire thousands more organizers, and a financial analysis has showed that they can. We should certainly run and win many more NLRB elections, but it’s unclear if the agency will ever be staffed adequately to handle the volume that’s needed. The labor movement’s shrinking size, uneven presence among the states, and diminishing political power means that the federal government’s principle agency in charge of facilitating new organizing will be an underfunded bottleneck, and we can’t rely exclusively on that framework.
Organizing will have to include non-traditional methods as well, and workers need more paths to form and join unions. We must increase training and support for workers to start their own organizing campaigns, as the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) has shown is possible. It may become more standard for workers, especially at huge companies, to have unions that fight for improvements, but don’t get recognition or a contract, in what EWOC calls pre-majority unionism.
The remainder of the Trump era will be tough terrain for the labor movement. It’s possible that the traditional union metrics reviewed here will continue to decline, as unions must take on significant defensive work fighting off attacks on federal workers and immigrant members. It’s also possible that expanded aggressive ICE activity has chilled organizing and striking among immigrant workers, and that may continue. On the other hand, we may see workers respond to these challenges in impressive and unconventional ways, as the recent Day of Truth and Freedom actions in Minnesota has shown.
The decline of the labor movement is no doubt one of the factors that have enabled Trumpism to capture the nation. The vast majority of workers are outside the networks of solidarity found within unions, and some have turned toward conservative ideology and fascist solutions to their problems. Others are understandably disillusioned with the tepid status quo tinkering from the Democratic Party.
At the same time, the unfortunately large percentage of union members attracted to MAGA also shows that unions must reengage their members with better political education and more militancy. Unions are at a low point not seen for a century, but we still have a strong base to rebuild from. Let’s go all in before it’s too late.
