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.

Source: NLRB Annual Election Reports

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 Relations Act (NLRA) era in the late 1930s to see the number of elections this low, and that’s when the election machinery was first being set up. Here’s a chart from the 1945 NLRB annual report showing the first 10 years of union elections and we can see that after 1940, the number was thousands/year.

Note: Cross-checks are when the NLRB would check signed union cards against the company payroll.

What’s interesting, and better news, is that the union win rate has held steady at around 70% for the past five years. In that article I discussed how the union election win rate was much lower in the past, from around 60% in the 1950s and 1960s, dropping to around 50% in the 1970s through 1990s, and then rising to around 70% today. Unions are much better at winning these elections today.

This higher win rate is in spite of the fact that unions have also had to deal with an…