Unionization Went Up a Bit Last Year

Unionists celebrated this week when new numbers showed their ranks had grown slightly in 2025:

Union membership increased by a tenth of a percentage point to 10 percent last year, because of successes in union organizing and slower labor market growth.

About 14.7 million workers were union members in 2025, an increase of 410,000, according to data released by the Labor Department on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the number of workers represented by unions rose to the highest level since 2009. That figure, which represents workers covered by union contracts generally, is higher than union membership numbers, because some workers opt out of membership in unionized workplaces, even though they receive the benefits of a union contract.

Here are the specific numbers for people covered by union contracts.

About 16.5 million workers were covered by a union contract in 2025, up from 16 million in 2024 and the highest level since 2009. The increase stems from workers joining unions as members – 14.7 million US workers were union members in 2025, up from 14.2 million workers in 2024.

The percentage of all workers in the US covered by a union contracts ticked up to 11.2% in 2025, compared with 11.1% in 2024.

So to sum up, union membership went from 9.9% to 10% and people covered by union contracts went from 11.1% to 11.2%. By far the largest segment of unionized workers is government workers. In fact, Trump may have directly helped improve the numbers there thanks to DOGE.

Despite the attacks on federal government unions, union membership in the public sector grew in 2025 and continued to be about five times higher than the private sector, at 32.9 percent. That boost came, in part, from a rise in union membership in the federal government, as tens of thousands of civil servants joined unions amid attacks on their jobs from the Trump administration.

“Even in our current broken system of labor law and policy … we’re seeing this increase in union density,” said Celine McNicholas, director of policy and government affairs at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “It’s clear that workers want union and are winning unions.”

The union take on all this is that it’s happening despite Trump’s attempts to ban unions for federal workers:

Last March and August, President Trump signed a pair of executive orders citing a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to ban unions at most federal agencies under the auspices of national security. Though most agencies implicated in the two edicts terminated their contracts with federal employee unions last summer, a smattering of agencies still recognize their workforces’ labor representatives due to court orders temporarily barring the orders’ implementation.

So the numbers are pretty marginal but unions see this as better than expected given their circumstances. And yet, this really does look like a blip in the overall trend which is decidedly downward. If you look not just at this year and last year but go back to the start of Joe Biden’s term, the numbers are down.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual report on union membership for 2025 on Wednesday, allowing for a complete appraisal of the Biden years. It shows that the union membership rate for all U.S. workers is 10 percent — down from when Biden took office in 2021. For private-sector workers, the rate is 5.9 percent, tied with 2024 for the record low.

It’s the continuation of a long-running downward trend in union membership. It has little to do with which party controls the White House or which labor policies a president pursues. The union membership rate has fallen during every presidential term since the 1980s. It fell by 0.4 percentage points during Donald Trump’s first term and by 0.3 percentage points during Biden’s term.

So the story here is that union membership pulled out of a dive last year, partly because of DOGE. But it’s likely that with that now over the trend of steady decline will resume. Here’s a chart that shows the past several decades up to 2023 when the union membership percentage was 10.1%, 0.1% higher than it is now.

Union membership hit a record low 10.1% (6% private, 33% government) pic.twitter.com/7vXxqa9xvE

— Tommy Schultz 🇺🇸 (@Tommy_USA) January 27, 2023

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