Union Election Wins Rise as the Labor Movement May See a Tremendous Upsurge Next Year
Union elections wins at the NLRB increased during the last fiscal year and are likely to continue.
#HotUnionSummer, #Striketember, #Striketober…
This past year has felt like the U.S. labor movement is on fire, with major strikes and huge contract settlements. Now I live in a union bubble no doubt, and my social media feeds are filled with news of strikes, organizing and wins. But this seems real. Two-thirds of Americans approve of unions, among the highest rate measured in decades, and huge majorities support the unions in recent strikes. Newer Gen Z workers are a more pro-union generation. Mainstream news coverage of unions is up, as well as folks googling “how do I form a union?”
The number of strikes has grown in the past few years, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Cornell ILR Labor Action Tracker recording increases from 2021 to 2022. In an exciting development, the UAW wants to align their Big 3 contracts to enable a huge strike on May Day 2028, and has invited other unions to do the same. Is all this militancy a sign of growing class struggle unionism?
Folks (including me) have talked for the last year about the labor movement possibly entering into one of those rare upsurges, not seen since the 1960s in the public sector and the 1930s in the private sector. We would love to see it.
However, the union membership rate remains at a low 10% of the workforce, and a crisis level 6% in the private sector. A major question is will the labor movement start to grow again after many decades of decline. Well we have some good news here.
Union Election Wins Increase
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has released its 2023 annual report on union elections for Fiscal Year 2023, which covers the time period from October, 2022 through September, 2023. The number of elections has increased 5% from 1,249 the year before, to 1,316 this past fiscal year. Even better, the number of union election wins rose 11%, and the union win rate has surged from 72% last year to an excellent 76% this year.
The chart below shows the trend for the last two decades for “RC elections,” which are the standard union-initiated type of elections. The number of elections has been declining for decades, but has increased over the last few years. The union win rate has grown fairly steadily over this time, from 55% for 2001–2003, to 71% for 2020–2022. My interpretation has been that unions are running fewer elections (way too few), but have gotten better at winning them, as they concentrate resources on elections that are nearly always filled with boss union busting and unfair labor practices (ULP).
But what about the number of workers in these elections? A major problem is that as unions have run fewer elections, way too few workers are being organized through them. The chart below shows the trend since 2001. Again we see a long term decline in the number of workers eligible to vote in union elections, and the number of workers in the winning elections, who have officially organized. But the last two years have seen an increase in both, and there was a 66% increase in organized workers in the last year, from 47,350 to 78,750. In fact, the number of workers organized in elections last year is the largest in decades, due to the higher union win rate and the average winning bargaining unit size growing over time as well.
It’s important to acknowledge that these NLRB elections are not the only way workers are organizing in the private sector. There are workers who fall under the Railway Labor Act and their organizing is not covered by this NLRB data. There are also workers who achieve voluntary recognition for their unions, and those who organize around immediate improvements without seeking official recognition. It’s likely that those forms of organizing are also increasing.
As encouraging as all this is, it’s not enough. To increase union density by even 1% each year, we have to organize over one million workers, and current private sector organizing victories are likely about 1/10th that. We need a massive increase of organizing.
New NLRB Cemex Framework
So here’s some more good news. The new NLRB “Cemex” framework, announced last August, allows workers to demand recognition based on majority support. The employer can either grant recognition or file an “RM petition” to challenge it within two weeks. If they then commit a ULP serious enough to impact the election, the NLRB will demand that the union be recognized and that bargaining begin.
This is the most important and favorable change in NLRB policy in decades, and we need to see how the framework will be enforced. But this next year we can expect an increase in voluntary recognitions, an avalanche of RM petitions, and many cases where ULPs lead directly to union recognition. There may also be plenty of cases where the employer ignores the initial demand recognition and does nothing, perhaps not understanding their legal obligations here. This is no longer acceptable, and they will end up with a union recognition and bargaining order. On the other hand, the Cemex framework will certainly be challenged in court, and a SCOTUS majority will probably hate it, so we’ll see how long it lasts.
The result of this should be a big increase in workers organized over this next year. And we may even finally see increases in the union membership rate when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announces the union membership numbers each January.
It’s Time to Go All In
How much new organizing happens depends on unions and workers being willing to go all in with this more favorable environment. Research has shown that unions have the money to hire tens of thousands of new organizers. Workers must continue to organize, in any way that they choose, and a relatively low unemployment rate gives them more leverage. Projects like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee are training workers in organizing skills, which is essential because unions will never have enough staff to reach all interested workers. And this organizing should not overly rely on NLRB procedures to save us. We need excellent, creative and militant organizing, always and everywhere. If we’re in a labor upsurge, it’s about to get upsurgier!
