Members of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Local 230, and their supporters walk the picket line in front of the Chrysler Corporate Parts Division in Ontario, California, on September 26, 2023.
Patrick T Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
The latest annual union membership numbers released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the share of unionized workers in both the public and private sectors remained at 10% in 2023. Union membership increased by 191,000 to a total of 14.4 million workers, but the share of workers represented by a union – including those whose jobs are covered by a union contract even if they are not members – actually fell from 11.3% to 11.2% workforce.
According to Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-union think tank that focuses on policy for lower-income workers, this lack of progress in the numbers seems at odds with the growing importance of unions in the workforce.
It is not a lack of public support that is stopping unions from making further progress in increasing their membership. Even before major victories in 2023, polls conducted in recent years have shown rising popularity for unions, with support reaching its highest level since 1965, according to 2022 data from Gallup.
Union polls have shown similarly positive results, with the AFL-CIO finding that the vast majority of registered voters in America support both unions and strikes – 71% of respondents support unions and 75% support workers leaving on strike.
However, according to the Gallup poll, only one in six Americans lives in a household with a union member, and the poll and others' polls show that non-union workers remain divided, about half divided, on interest in joining a union – The 2022 Gallup poll found that the share of non-union workers who were not interested in joining was 58%.
“The Great Reset”
The year 2023 has been a banner year for American workers supporting the labor movement.
“I used the term 'The Great Reset' to describe what happened in collective bargaining in 2023, with the big collective bargaining deals, the threat of strikes, the use of the strike as a source of power,” says Thomas Kochan, professor at from the MIT Sloan School of Management, who has studied union formation trends for decades. He said the deals achieved last year “far exceed anything achieved since the early 2000s. So it’s a big year in terms of achievements.”
In 2023, there were 451 strikes with wins for workers in various sectors of the economy, from SAG-AFTRA and The Writers Guild of America in entertainment to logistics, health care and hotels and casino workers across the country also went on strike, according to the Cornell-ILR Labor Action Tracker successful.
One reason membership numbers haven't increased has to do with the overall size of the workforce. “We have seen an influx of workers into the workforce, so the labor force is growing as fast or even a little faster than union membership,” Kochan said.
Kochan noted that union membership has improved in the private sector and that the gains have been concentrated among a few groups of workers: young workers, workers of color and workers in high-tech industries.
The numbers clearly show that this is the case. Workers of color accounted for the entire increase in unionization in 2023, at 309,000, while membership among white, non-Hispanic workers fell by 119,000, according to EPI's analysis of the new data. Union membership among workers under 45 rose by 229,000, while the total number of workers 45 and older fell.
Dispute over labor laws
As union issues have gained increasing public support in recent years, labor experts say a change to the current structure of labor laws is needed to drive membership. That's a point they reiterated after annual figures for 2023 showed another year of stagnation.
“Even though there is great popularity of unions, great interest in them, and increasing union activity, we still have extremely weak labor laws that make it very, very easy for employers or state legislatures to really suppress union organizing.” Shierholz said.
She described the National Labor Relations Act, the law that governs private sector bargaining, as “incredibly weak, breathtakingly weak, in that it fails to truly protect workers' right to freedom of association.”
An employer's penalties for violating the law are minimal, and public workers face barriers to unionization from state and local governments.
“In recent years there has been increasing action to break up state and local government unions,” she said.
According to the BLS data, 31 states and the District of Columbia had union membership rates below the national average of 10% – 11 states had union membership rates below 5%, with South Carolina at the bottom at 2.3%. And where unions are present in large numbers, the numbers are not evenly distributed. About 29% of the 14.4 million union members lived in California and New York, according to the BLS.
Shierholz pointed to tactics such as refusing to allow members to pay union dues through a payroll deduction, which increases the administrative burden on unions, as well as restrictive state and local policies regarding what can be included in negotiations, including wage increase provisions that are not included linked to inflation.
“All of these things serve to break any strength of a union,” Shierholz said. “There are a growing number of states doing these things, and that played a huge role in the numbers in 2023.”
Kochan says that while it is possible that there will be an increase in union membership in 2024, which represents a lagging effect on the success and significance of unions and strikes in 2023, it is simply too early to tell . But he points to calls for more union opportunities that are real.
“We did a lot of research to find out how non-union workers would vote if given the opportunity to decide whether or not to unionize, and those numbers have increased significantly,” Kochan said.
“Before the turn of the century, about a third of the non-union workforce said they would vote for a union if given the chance. Today it is 50%,” he said.
The hurdles to organizing these workers remain significant, but he said, “That's 60 million American workers who would get representation.”
Kochan also said that advances in labor laws will determine the future. “The demand is there. Whether it can be satisfied with our existing labor laws is the big question and challenge.”