Why Don’t More People Join Them?

Here’s a puzzler: unions representing autoworkers, screenwriters, and baristas scored big victories in 2023, while public opinion of unions is near its highest level in decades, yet the membership rate slipped to its lowest ever. How come? 

Fierce legal opposition from companies, the aftermath of a 2018 Supreme Court decision, and the slow wheels of bureaucracy are all among the reasons that a resurgence in union organizing has not—or hasn’t yet—translated into a reversal of a generation-long slide in union membership, labor experts said. 

“It’s always a slog,” said Michelle Fecteau, a director at the Center for Labor and Community Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. “They don’t call it a ‘struggle’ for nothing.” 

When the Department of Labor released its yearly data on union membership this week, the results weren’t what organized labor advocates wanted to see. Only 10% of the workforce were union members in 2023, down from 10.1% in 2022, and a record low in data going back to 1983. The membership rate hit another milestone, falling below half of the 20.1% union membership rate in 1983. 

The continued slow downtick in union membership came despite several high-profile union victories this year. Those included: 

• United Autoworkers members won pay increases and other concessions from Detroit automakers after a first-of-its-kind simultaneous strike against the big three companies. 
• Workers from at least 385 Starbucks locations have voted to unionize since an organizing drive began in 2021 despite fierce opposition from the company, although the coffee retailer has yet to agree to any contracts with members of the Starbucks Workers United union.
• Screenwriters won pay raises and restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence after striking against Hollywood studios. 
• Unions got support from the administration of President Joe Biden, who calls himself “the most pro-union president in history.” That included a new federal labor rule that makes it easier for contractors and employees of franchises to form unions. 
• Unions have been growing more popular in recent years. As of August, 67% of people had a favorable opinion of unions according to a Gallup poll, down from 71% in 2022, which had been its highest since 1965. 

All this happened in a labor market where, by historical standards, workers have a lot of leverage: Unemployment was near historic lows, and there were far more open jobs than jobless workers to fill them. 

Despite all those advantages and victories, organizing efforts were hindered by some powerful factors. 

The Supreme Court

In 2018, the Supreme Court dealt unions a blow when, in a 5-4 decision in the Janus vs. AFSCME case, the court’s conservative majority ruled that public employees no longer had to pay dues to unions if they work under a union contract but are not union members themselves.

This ruling meant that unions representing public employees, such as school teachers, now have to spend more effort and money getting individual people to sign up, detracting from their other activities, said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research and a professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

“Because they have to spend so many resources signing up the members they already have, that is taking away resources from doing new organizing,” Bronfenbrenner said.

Indeed, the union membership trend is worse among public sector unions than for those in private industry, according to the BLS data. In 2023, the number of union members in the private sector rose by 191,000, but the overall rate went down because more non-union jobs were added to the economy. 

However, public sector employees actually lost 52,000 members, highlighting the damage the Janus decision has done to public sector unions. 

Fierce opposition from employers

Another reason, Bronfenbrenner said, is that companies have fiercely resisted unionization efforts, especially in the courts. 

“They’re challenging certifications or filing charges against the unions, which then get dismissed, but they delay all those certifications and delay the collective bargaining process,” she said. 

For example, after workers at an Amazon (AMZN) warehouse in Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022, Amazon unsuccessfully filed with the National Labor Relations Board to overturn the results. However, the union has yet to negotiate a labor contract, and the union has accused the online retailer of stalling the process, according to press reports.

Some conservative groups celebrated last year’s decline in union membership.

“American workers continue to reject forced labor union membership, instead choosing freedom and self-determination in the workplace,” Americans for Tax Reform, a pro-business lobbying group, said in a blog post. 

Contracts take time, especially if someone’s stalling

The way the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts union membership, people in a workplace represented by a union may not count if they don’t have a contract—that means many of last year’s successful unionization drives aren’t yet showing up in the statistics,  Bronfenbrenner said. 

So far, she said, many companies have been able to use delaying tactics to avoid reaching contracts with unions, and have suffered very little legal repercussion. 

“These corporations feel like until something changes, the cost of not bargaining is less than the cost of bargaining,” she said. 

The slow pace of unionization has helped drive rates down, as unionized workers are laid off or retire as part of the natural churn of the economy, Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, said in a commentary.

“As a result of the growing employer opposition to unions and the failure of policy to stem it, workers are unable to organize new union members fast enough under current labor law to keep pace with the natural ‘churning out’ of unionized jobs,” she wrote.