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on his first Labor Day in the White House, then-president Joe Biden reiterated his frequent pledge to exceed all of his predecessors in supporting organized labor.
"I intend to be the most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history," he told a room full of union leaders and activists.
Biden emphasized his commitment to unions in ways substantive and symbolic. He joined strikers on a picket line. He ordered the drafting of numerous pro-union policies. He reveled in the moniker "Union Joe." He publicly endorsed workers seeking to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama. He urged Congress to pass the so-called PRO Act, a bill that would cancel protections for workers who choose not to join a union.
"A year into his presidency," Farah Stockman wrote in The New York Times in 2022, "it is becoming clear that [Biden] is already the most pro-labor president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt."
So let's take stock. After four years of "the most pro-union administration in American history," how are unions doing?
Judging from the upbeat media coverage over the past couple of years — the stories about unions being at their "strongest in decades" and "on a roll" and "hugely popular"; the reports on Big Labor's energetic "push to unionize every U.S. auto plant" and on how "the future of college sports is unionized"; and the assurances that "the anti-union South is starting to crack" and that "labor's next big moment may finally be at hand" — a casual news consumer might reasonably conclude that under Biden's benevolent tenure, this has been a new golden age for organized labor.
But unions have hardly been racking up impressive victories or recruiting new members at remarkable rates. Quite the opposite.
On Jan. 28 the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual compilation of data on union membership in the United States. It shows that the share of American workers who belong to a union dipped in 2024 to 9.9 percent. That is the lowest proportion recorded since the federal government began tracking the numbers more than 40 years ago — and the fourth consecutive year in which the unionization rate fell.
In the mid-1950s, more than a third of all US workers were union members. By 1983, when BLS began issuing its yearly survey, 20 percent of workers belonged to unions. Now membership has fallen to single digits. Over the past four decades, the US workforce has exploded by roughly 65 million. Yet in absolute numbers, the total of wage and salary workers who belong to unions has shrunk by 3.4 million.
Outside of government, union membership has all but melted away. Last year the number of private-sector union members dropped by 184,000, reducing the share of nongovernment employees who belong to unions to a puny 5.9 percent. Democrats have long characterized unions as a gateway to the American middle class (and lately some MAGA Republicans have been pandering to unions as well). But in most private industries, including the blue-collar trades where labor organizers once held sway, union membership is now like manual transmission in cars: Here and there vehicles are still being driven with a clutch and stick shift, but their numbers have dwindled to near-irrelevance.
As Dominic Pino pointed out last month in National Review, the overwhelming majority of workers in such fields as manufacturing, construction, mining, transportation, and warehousing are not union members. Efforts to unionize employees attract disproportionate media cheerleading, especially when the unions target iconic American companies like Starbucks and Amazon. But there isn't nearly as much coverage when workers in high-profile workplaces vote against joining a union — as they have recently at a Mercedes factory in Alabama, an Amazon warehouse in North Carolina, and even Princeton University — or when scores of unions each year are decertified in workplace elections.
Some unions certainly have had a run of success, as with the 500-plus Starbucks cafes that have been unionized since 2021. Yet even that amounts to little more than a drop in the bucket: Starbucks has more than 17,000 locations in the United States.
In the abstract, most Americans say they approve of unions. But when it comes to their own jobs and their own lives, it's a different story. Like learning a second language — or like driving a stick shift — joining a union may hold a theoretical appeal. But it is rarely something individuals willingly choose for themselves.
Two or three generations ago, a union card might have been a ticket to economic stability. That is no longer the case, as Veronique de Rugy, an economist at George Mason University, has observed. "While unionized plants pay higher wages and benefits than do nonunionized ones," she wrote last year, quoting a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, "they also experience higher rates of closure, reduced investment, and slower employment growth." Private-sector workers who want the protection of a union should have every right to try and organize one — as long as their coworkers have every right to say no.
In the third decade of the 21st century, it is clear that the great majority Americans simply do not want what unions are peddling. After four years of the "most pro-union administration in American history," unions are less relevant to American workers' lives and livelihoods than they have been in generations. The air is going out of the labor movement, and not even a president can pump it up.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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