Celebrating the Decline of Big Labor

National Review Online

Monday, September 01, 2025

 

Labor Day this year is a cause for raucous celebration: For the first time, the share of U.S. workers who are union members has fallen below 10 percent. Looking only at private-sector workers, the share who are union members is 5.9 percent.

 

Those numbers are all the more remarkable because they come after four years of the Biden administration doing everything it could to boost organized labor. Biden called himself the “most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration,” and he was probably right, at least since Franklin Roosevelt.

 

The Biden administration bailed out union pension funds with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. It mandated union labor for infrastructure projects and baked union-favorable provisions into the CHIPS Act. It backed the “buy American” rules, prevailing wage rules, and protectionism that unions love. Biden’s NLRB appointees backed unions at every opportunity. And Biden himself was the first president to walk a picket line, joining UAW workers in Michigan in 2023.

 

Biden inherited a record-low union membership rate of 10.3 percent in 2021. It set a new record low in 2022 of 10.1 percent, then another in 2023 at 10 percent, and then another in 2024 at 9.9 percent. No other president has set a new record low every year he was in office since Ronald Reagan — impressive!

 

No matter who is president, the union membership rate has been declining for decades, and it has yet to see even a dead-cat bounce. That’s because the American people, by and large, aren’t interested in having union bosses skim their paychecks, give some of the money to politicians, keep some for themselves, and purport to be acting in their best interest when they know full well they aren’t.

 

The relatively few workers who do find union membership advantageous tend to work for the government. Despite government workers only making up about 15 percent of the U.S. workforce, they make up about half of the population of union members. About one-third of all union members are in the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers, the two largest teachers’ unions.

 

The blue-collar hard-hat image of union members refuses to die even though it stopped being true years ago. Eighty-four percent of transportation and warehousing workers, 90 percent of construction workers, and 92 percent of manufacturing workers are not union members. Policies that benefit unions in general mostly benefit public school teachers and bureaucrats in practice.

 

Two of the largest growth industries for organized labor are journalism and higher education. The latter, which is the result of an Obama NLRB ruling that has spawned such groups as the UAW chapter at Columbia University that played a major role in the anti-Israel protests that shut down campus, may diminish soon. A student at Cornell is challenging the Obama ruling, and Trump’s NLRB appointees may overturn it.

 

Blue states lag behind the overall trend. New York and California have 17 percent of U.S. workers, but almost 30 percent of U.S. union members. The states with the lowest rates include the Carolinas, which do not allow collective bargaining in the public sector.

 

More states should look to abolish public-sector collective bargaining, as Utah did this year. And more states should pick up where Republicans left off in the early-to-mid 2010s by passing right-to-work laws. The first order of business should be restoring Michigan’s law that Democrats repealed. In 24 states, private-sector workers can still be coerced to join or financially support a union.

 

Public-sector workers no longer can be coerced, according to the Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision in 2018. But some still are because states have failed to update their laws to reflect that decision. All states need to end automatic dues deduction and make clear to new hires that union membership or agency fees are not required for government employment.

 

As WFB wrote in National Review’s credenda from the first issue in 1955, “The public has been taught to assume (almost instinctively) that conflicts between labor and management are generally traceable to greed and intransigence on the part of management.” The media try their best to keep up this impression, with breathless coverage of every organizing drive and hype around union bosses like Shawn Fain. Because of a series of conservative wins in the past 70 years, fewer Americans see things that way.

 

“National Review will explore and oppose the inroads upon the market economy caused by monopolies in general, and politically oriented unionism in particular,” the credenda goes on to say. And that’s really the rub: Unions are government-backed monopolies, and Americans don’t like government-backed monopolies, no matter how often they are told they should, and especially if those monopolies take some of their hard-earned money and send it to politicians they don’t like.