As Americans enjoy the coming Labor Day, a day designed to celebrate the country’s labor movement, economists, historians, and union activists are asking: where does the U.S. labor movement stand in 2024?
Just looking at the numbers alone paints a depressing picture for the movement: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, exactly 10% of the country’s workforce is currently made up of union members.
That statistic represents a swift decline from 1954 when upwards of a third of the national workforce was represented by a union.
Conversely, while actual union membership is at a more than 70-year low, the number of people who support the idea of a labor union is at a historic high. According to a recent Gallup Survey, 70% of respondents said they approved of the idea of labor unions.
That level of support has remained the same for the last two years and is significantly higher than what Gallup recorded just two decades ago, when only 53% of respondents felt positive about unionization.
Despite the overall decline in national membership levels, notes the publication The City, recent membership efforts have proven surprisingly successful “with more than 75% of all private-sector organizing attempts from mid-2023 to mid-2024 resulting in union victories.”
According to the most recent annual State of the Union report compiled by the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, Boston has seen a 75% union election success rate, followed by Chicago at 72%, New York at 64%, and Seattle at 56%.
The CUNY report additionally notes that younger organizers, buoyed by successful elections at Amazon, Apple, and Starbucks, have also been “actively unionizing journalists, museum workers, nonprofit staff, medical interns and residents, and especially graduate student workers and adjuncts in colleges and universities.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics report, meanwhile, reveals that Hawaii and New York have the highest union membership rates, at 24.1% and 20.6% respectively, while South Carolina and North Carolina recorded the lowest rates at 2.3% and 2.7%.
Union worker representation has proven to be particularly on the low side in the West, with just 4.8% of all workers in Arizona in a union; 8.6% in Colorado; and 9.1% in New Mexico.
By Garry Boulard
