Union Elections Continue to Decline, and Maybe That’s OK
In 2018, the number of union elections fell to nearly 1,000, the lowest level in 80 years, almost the entire era of the National Labor Relations Act
The labor movement has been in decline for decades and its traditional strategy to revive and grow has been organizing around National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union elections. How is that going?
The NLRB election data for fiscal year 2018 is out and I took a look at the last five years to see recent union elections results. Here is the number of RC elections (where the union files for representation and official certification) and the union win rate. I’m only looking at RC elections because I’m interested in the elections that unions plan as part of their organizing programs, and the other types of elections are relatively small in number and not interesting for this analysis.
In recent decades the number of elections have fallen dramatically, from a high point of over 8,000/year in the 1970s to the low thousands in the 1980s and 1990s, and now just above 1,000 in recent years, as I discuss in this article. The average for the past five years has been 1,259 elections/year. In 2018, it was 1,055 which is an alarmingly low number. I looked back at early NLRB annual reports and you have to go back to the very early days of the National Labor…
