A New Golden Age for Labor? Not So Fast

Although there’s been an uptick in labor organizing in recent years, it hasn’t been the “resurgence” that many commentators claim it is. It’s also a markedly segmented phenomenon.

We all know that organized labor has a numbers problem. Despite recent talk of “banner years” and “historic victories,” union density has continued to decline, reaching a record low of 9.9% in 2024 - the last year in office for the self-proclaimed “most pro-union president in history.”

In addition to this basic numbers problem, I think the labor movement also has to face up to a compositional one: labor has indeed been marginally more active in recent years, but that activity is not uniform. As I demonstrate in an article out today in The Nation, the recent uptick in labor activity, measured by a few metrics, has been more or less confined to two sectors - academia and healthcare - and predominantly to urban areas. Here’s the last ten years of large-unit union election wins, i.e., the number of new union members organized in elections of units 250 or larger:

Coming out of the pandemic, unions are not only running more large-unit elections, but they’re also winning them at a greater clip. But those gains are overwhelmingly in academia and healthcare. As I say in the article,

In 2023, 51,814 academic and healthcare workers became union members through large-unit elections, while only 6,537 workers in all other sectors did so. We are unlikely to see such an exaggerated disparity in future years, but it’s still indicative of a marked compositional evolution. Through the lens of large-unit elections, the much-vaunted recent “resurgence” in labor activity is a decidedly segmented phenomenon.

There’s other interesting bits that I kind of want to highlight, but I’ll leave it there and hope you read the full article instead.