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Key Takeaways:
State of the Union for US Labor Unions
As of this writing in the final week of February 2025, the outlook for organized labor over the next several years and beyond is very much up in the air.
President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer received scrutiny from both sides of the aisle last week, and her confirmation remains very much in question, with Republicans raising concerns about pro-union legislation she co-sponsored during her single term as a Congressional representative and Democrats criticizing her attempts to distance herself from her previous union support.
In the same week, however, the Acting General Counsel for the National Labor Relations Board - whose pro-union predecessor was fired as one of President Trump’s first official acts after reclaiming office - began rescinding policy memos issued under the Biden administration that provided guidance on topics ranging from non-compete agreements to the digital surveillance of employees.
Given these competing visions within the Trump administration and the Republican Party, there is a great deal of uncertainty about the future of labor unions in the US. Those questions come at a time when major, broad sweeping disruptions to the labor market due to technological advancement - especially artificial intelligence - seem more possible than maybe ever before.
In light of that uncertainty, and coinciding with President Trump’s planned State-of-the-Union-like address to a joint session of Congress next week during which he may very well provide some clarity on the approach his administration will take on labor protections and regulations, we wanted to take a closer look at labor unions as they exist in the US today, both as snapshot of the current environment for organized labor and as a benchmark to measure the success of new policies against as they are enacted and take effect.
US Labor Union Membership By the Numbers
According to the Current Population Survey, about 9.9% of all US workers ages 16 and older were members of labor unions, amounting to about 14.3 million, which is down by about 170 thousand workers from 2023 when there were a little over 14.4 million union members in the US accounting for about 10% of the labor force.
Due to the duty of fair representation, the number of US workers represented by unions is of course even larger than union membership rolls, with a little more than 16 million US workers befitting from union representation in 2024, representing about 11.1% of the workforce, which is down by about 170 thousand workers from almost 16.2 million in 2023, representing about 11.2% of the US workforce then.
Union membership in 2024 was split approximately evenly between public and private sector employees at about 7 million and 7.2 million, respectively. Because the private sector is so much larger than the public sector, however, the proportion of public sector employees who belong to a union is much greater than the proportion of private sector employees who do so.
The proportion of public sector US employees that were members of unions in 2024 was 32.2%, which essentially held steady year over year from 2023, whereas the proportion of private sector employees with union membership in 2024 was only about 5.9%, down from 6% the year before.
Almost 4 out of 10 employees on local government payrolls (38.2%) were union members in 2024, which is fairly unsurprising given union strength among police forces, educators, and firefighters, while the industries with the largest unionization rates in the private sector are utilities (18.7% union) and transportation & warehousing (15.8% union).
The lowest unionization rate among government workers belongs to federal employees, only 25.3% of which are unionized as of 2024, which is up from 25.1% in 2023 even though the number of federal employees that are union members fell by more than 130 thousand between 2023 and 2024, dropping to about 1.1 million.
In the private sector, the lowest unionization rates belong to the finance (0.8% union) and insurance industries (1.2% union), followed by the professional & technical services (1.2%) and agriculture industries (1.4% union).
Library and security & protective service workers had the highest proportion of union membership among occupations at 32.3% and 29.6%, respectively, while farm/fishing/forestry workers (1.5% union) and sales professionals (2.7% union) were the occupations with the lowest rates of unionization.
Union membership is lowest in the South and highest along the Pacific and Mid to North Atlantic coasts, with North Carolina (2.4% union), South Dakota (2.7% union), and South Carolina (2.8% union) claiming the lowest unionization rates.
Interestingly, 2 of the 3 states in which unionization was highest in 2024 were not connected to the continental US, with Hawaii and Alaska recording 26.5% and 17.7% union membership, respectively. New York (20.6% union), Connecticut (16.5%), and Washington (16.0%) had the highest unionization rates among contiguous states.
Almost 3 out of 10 union members (29%) now live in just 2 states - New York and California - which is almost double the percentage that all workers from New York and California - union and non-union alike - represent as a portion of the total US workforce (17%).
Mployer’s Take
Over the last 40 years, the proportion of the US workforce that belongs to a labor union has decreased by half - from a little more than 1 out of 5 full-time salaried US workers with union membership in 1983 to about 1 in 10 as of 2024.
During that same time, however, the actual number of union workers in the US has been reduced by a considerably smaller margin, with only about 2 million fewer union employees working in the US today than there were in the mid-1980s, accounting for only an approximate 15% decrease in total union membership over the last 4 decades.
In effect, as the US and the US worker population has grown, union workers as a proportion of the total population has decreased considerably, but union workers and union jobs have remained fairly entrenched nonetheless, even if unable to keep up with population growth and economic expansion.
If current union membership figures rely on entrenched workers, however, those workers are rapidly aging out of the workforce, and how well-protected those jobs are going forward may be put to the test sooner than later.
Just looking at the age breakdown alone paints a fairly grim picture of the future of union membership. For example, workers between the ages of 45 and 54 have the highest rate of unionization at 12.6%, while workers ages 16 to 24 claim the lowest proportional union membership at 4.3%.
That said, although unionization was much higher among full-time workers (10.7% union) compared to part-time workers (5.7% union) in 2024, the percentage of unionized full-time workers fell last year (minus 0.2%) while the unionized percentage of part-time workers increased (plus 0.5%), which is a noteworthy development. With growth in part-time employment outpacing full-time growth, unionization may have some tailwinds here.
Realistically, however, while the future head of the Department of Labor remains unknown for the time being, the current nominee is representing positions that are both more favorable toward organized labor than any potential future nominee from this administration is likely to be, but also less favorable toward organized labor and worker protections than the previous Secretary of Labor, so the trend is apparent even if the ultimate appointee is not.
Still, the advantages that unions offer to workers remain significant, perhaps most notably when comparing pay rates, with full-time, salaried union workers bringing in median annual earnings of about $70 thousand in 2024 whereas non-union members earned a little less than $60 thousand under the same conditions, which is more than 15% less.
The momentum is working against the expansion of unions and enhanced worker protections, however, and if President Trump’s first term and/or Elon Musk’s questioning of the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board serve as any indication, the momentum against organized labor is more likely to intensify than to subside over the next few years at least.
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