As Labor Day comes this year, US workers and the labor movement face a critical juncture.
In some ways, labor is on a roll. Petitions for union elections with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) doubled from 2021 to 2025. Workers have formed their first-ever unions at big companies, including Amazon, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and REI. And people in the United States support unions more now than they have in decades: 70 percent of those surveyed in a Gallup poll approve of labor unions, the highest since 1965. A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found a rise in the number of US workers who are curious about unions and fewer who were explicitly opposed. Research also suggests that as many as 60 million of US workers would join unions if they could.
Yet unionization rates are still declining.
The state of the labor movement has repercussions for the entire country.
Overall, 9.9 percent of US workers in 2024 were union members, with the private sector membership at 5.9 percent. The fact is that organizing a union remains risky. A few years ago, an EPI report found that pro-union workers were illegally fired in nearly one in five union election campaigns. Even when workers vote in favor of a union, management recalcitrance often impedes them from securing a first contract. For example, workers at the big companies mentioned above are all still negotiating their first contracts.
Meanwhile, the labor movement is also staring down threats to long-held institutional protections for working people. For instance, SpaceX, Trader Joe’s, and Starbucks have filed lawsuits in an effort to get the US Supreme Court to declare the National Labor Relations Act—the foundational labor law of 1935—unconstitutional.
So, how can labor turn the tide?
Why Should We Care About Unions?
The roughly 90 percent of US workers who are not union members may wonder why they should be concerned. One reason is that the state of the labor movement has repercussions for the entire country.
Strong unions help create a more equitable economy. This is partially true due to the wage gains that unions help workers obtain, but also because, when union membership rates are high, nonunion workers enjoy higher wages as well, as nonunion employers seek to match the gains that workers at unionized companies receive. Unions are also important political actors that can advance policies to boost workers’ rights and benefits. For example, an academic study from the Swedish Institute for Social Research at Stockholm University found that in US states where unions are strong, paid family leave policies are much more likely to become law.
Unfortunately, the reverse is also true: weaker unions lead to less equitable economies. Nowadays, we are living that reality—US income inequality has been on the rise for more than 40 years. A 2020 study published by RAND estimated that $47 trillion had been transferred from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent from 1985 to 2018.
The share of wealth going to the top 10 percent has climbed since unionization rates began falling in the 1970s. Researchers at EPI found that deunionization was the second most contributing factor in suppressed wage growth and growing inequality in the past four decades, behind only excessive unemployment.
Economic inequality is hurting many families: 42 percent do not have any emergency savings funds, and 40 percent could not cover an emergency cost of $1,000. According to a Pew Research survey, 77 percent of respondents in the United States reported being anxious about finances, and 74 percent believe that their children will be worse off than they are.
Capital Is Highly Organized
The threats facing workers and unions today largely stem from the fact that the business-owning class is highly organized. In the United States, corporations spend approximately $400 million annually on union-busting consultants. It is estimated that these consultants (typically lawyers) are hired in two-thirds of all organizing campaigns.
An ironic result of increased US income inequality is that higher stock values…have enabled union assets to grow rapidly.
Corporations have also sought to circumvent employment law, using “gig workers” both to avoid paying benefit costs and to keep unions out. App-based businesses like Uber rake in billions in revenue generated by gig drivers. The 390,000 drivers who make Amazon’s delivery system function, whose trucks are painted with Amazon’s logo and who wear Amazon logo shirts, are not considered Amazon employees but are employed by “delivery service partners.” Yet Amazon mandates a pace of work so unbearable that many drivers have been reduced to urinating in bottles.
How Can Labor Fight Back and Build Power?
The challenges facing workers and the labor movement are not easy to solve. However, only a highly organized labor movement can help workers win against a highly organized capitalist class, which requires a combination of worker-to-worker organizing, enhanced research capacity, and political movement building.
Each of these themes is discussed below:
- Organizing: If 60 million US workers want to join unions, unions must meet this demand! This is not a novel concept. In the 1990s, John J. Sweeney, then president of the AFL-CIO, called on unions to devote 30 percent of their resources to new organizing. But most unions did not heed this call.
But could they do so now? An ironic result of increased US income inequality is that higher stock values—an important indicator of capital’s power—have enabled union assets to grow rapidly.
Labor researcher Chris Bohner wrote in Jacobin that unions’ net assets have climbed from $14.4 billion in 2010 to $32.7 billion in 2022. He argues that rather than being invested on Wall Street, these assets should be invested in building union power. For example, Bohner talks about how the United Auto Workers (UAW) was willing to spend $152 million on strike benefits in 2023—more than was spent on union strike benefits by all unions in 2022—to get a better contract for the union’s members. The strike was widely considered a success: Ford workers received a 25 percent wage increase over four and a half years, for example.
The UAW, however, understands that long-term power building requires a larger labor movement, which is why, the following year, it announced a $40 million commitment toward a new organizing drive, focused on electric vehicle plant workers.
In addition to money, unions must consider their organizing methods. In We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, Rutgers Labor Studies Professor Eric Blanc argues for a worker-to-worker organizing model.
Blanc points out to Starbucks Workers United as an example of the power of worker-to-worker organizing. After the first workers voted to unionize two Starbucks stores in Buffalo in 2021, today more than 12,000 workers at 600 stores have joined the union.
The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC)—a project of the Democratic Socialists of America and United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America—offers its own worker-led model, one in which workers who are in the early stages of forming a union can get support from an EWOC volunteer organizer and, later on, help connect organizing drives to national unions. Since its founding in 2020, EWOC has built a network of over 600 volunteer organizers.
Workers’ interests have been ignored in US politics for a long time….which is something labor unions could act on.
- Research: Research is an important tool for labor unions to better understand how to leverage worker power against employers. Good research allows unions to identify a company’s profit centers, its key relationships, and its reputational pressure points. As Erica Smiley and Daniel Schlademan wrote in NPQ, “Every company has its Achilles’ heel.”
Take, for example, UNITE HERE Local 11’s use of strategic research to support hotel worker strikes in Southern California. First, the union purposefully aligned over 60 hotel contracts to expire in the summer of 2023, giving them a chance to raise the industry standard for hotel workers in the region. The union also identified several shadowy private equity firms that owned many of the hotels.
UNITE HERE Local 11 used this information to both publicly shame the private equity firms and to get public pension funds, many of which have union trustees, to leverage their investment holdings to support hotel workers. The union’s strategic planning and the workers’ brave action paid off in union contracts that raised pay by unprecedented amounts, with many workers receiving $11.25 hourly wage increases.
- Movement building: Unions must also now contend with what organizing looks like under an increasingly authoritative government. It is unquestionable that, in the short run, the shift of politics at the federal level will make union gains more difficult. Already, the Trump administration has launched a myriad of attacks—including seeking to strip bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of federal workers, and an unprecedented firing of an NLRB member whose term wasn’t up until 2028.
But the longer-term effect of the nation’s authoritarian turn is far less predictable. To give but one example, today’s Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was first known for building and leading the metal workers’ union during Brazil’s military dictatorship.
Many union activists will tell you that the best organizer is a bad boss. In other words, draconian anti-worker federal policies could motivate working people to organize and take action. In a joint 2024 article published by Jacobin, Blanc and Bohner pointed out that more workers formed unions under George W. Bush than during Barack Obama’s administration. This is likely because labor spent more on organizing in those years, they argued.
Fast-forward to 2025, and the Federal Unionist Network (FUN) has risen as an opposition force to Trump’s attack on federal workers. The network has garnered the support of all major federal unions, a notable achievement for a previously fractured segment of the labor movement.
The Best Defense Is a Good Offense
Workers’ interests have been ignored in US politics for a long time. As a recent report by Working Families Power exposed how “the working class is structurally underrepresented,” which is something labor unions could act on.
Even given their historically low numbers, unions still have 14.3 million members, which is no small number. Indeed, that number is 1.5 million more people than the 12.8 million workers that the entire nonprofit sector employs.
Of course, it may feel easier to remain on the defensive, but as Hildy Gottlieb observed back in April, “Making yourself small is rarely a strong long-term strategy.” She was writing about nonprofits, but the same logic applies to the labor movement.
Unions must take bold, strategic action to organize workers and win strong contracts. That is what unions do.
Working people know they are worth more than their bosses give them, and they’re ready to organize to fight for their rights. They need a strong, fighting, and unified labor movement to help them do so.
