As of 2025, fewer than 10 percent of all civilian workers and fewer than 6 percent of private-sector workers are members of labor unions. With those low levels of union membership, one might think that organized labor is not worth one’s time or interest.
That would be a grave mistake. Despite its decreased footprint from its mid-20th century heights, organized labor remains a pillar of the organized progressive movement and the Democratic Party that serves as its electoral vehicle. It also maintains and would like to improve its position as a player in the national economy.
Here are the 10 things you need to know about organized labor:
1. Organized labor has been in decline for about a half century.
Organized labor reached its peak in “density” (the proportion of workers who are union members) in the 1950s. Since the 1950s, union density has declined from about one in three civilian nonfarm workers to about one in 10. Total union membership is estimated to have peaked in 1979 at approximately 21 million of 87 million total employed workers. As of 2024, union membership stood at about 14 million of over 125 million total workers.
The New Deal Democrats under Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act after its sponsor) to create a formal structure for union organizing and compulsory monopoly negotiation with a “majority union” that had support from a majority of a relevant workforce. The Wagner Act facilitated a surge in union membership and union power, which was accompanied by strong union support for Roosevelt’s and Wagner’s Democratic Party.
But by the 1970s, the model of “Three Bigs”—Big Government, Big Business, and Big Labor—established by the New Deal and defined the immediate post–World War II economy was collapsing as a result of cultural change and the return to normalcy of the world economy. Energy prices spiked while consumers demanded control over inflation.
Unions lost the power to demand and deliver “more” for their members in a new era of competition, and membership began to slip despite growth in government-worker unions. That slippage has not reversed over the subsequent decades.
2. Organized labor has sought to reverse its long decline not by changing its offerings, cleaning up its internal operations, or politically moderating, but by forcing workers to join unions and pay dues.
In 1947, a Republican-controlled Congress with support from many Democrats passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Harry S. Truman’s veto. The legislation curbed powers Big Labor had abused and limited unions’ powers to force workers to join unions and pay dues, most notably by authorizing state-level “right to work” laws that prohibit conditioning employment on membership in or fee payments to a labor organization.
Big Labor has blamed the law for its decline ever since and has sought to force more workers into unions. During the George W. Bush administration and Obama administration, these efforts focused on securing a government guarantee for “card check,” a form of union organizing under which workers sign public cards to demonstrate final and irrevocable support for unionizing rather than casting a secret ballot in an election. But “card check” proved deeply unpopular, and the dubiously named Employee Free Choice Act could not secure the required support to pass.
More recently, Big Labor has endorsed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which since his death in 2021 has borne the name of former AFL-CIO union federation head Richard Trumka. While this legislation would not formally codify card check, it would do vastly more to compel union membership, including overriding all state-level right-to-work laws and restricting which workers could consider themselves independent businesspeople ineligible for union organizing.
Going a step further, some political figures—including some prominent Republicans—have endorsed an even more coercive measure called “sectoral bargaining.” Used in Europe, sectoral bargaining would completely take away workers’ right to escape a union-dominated workplace—making it a very bad idea indeed.
3. Union voluntarism is a critical value.
Since the debate over the Taft-Hartley Act, conservatives have pushed a party consensus on labor-management relations based on balancing individual workers’ rights, employers’ legitimate authorities, and unions’ right to exist where desired. The first prong of the three-pronged consensus is voluntarism: Workers should not be prohibited from joining unions, but they must not be forced to join, pay dues, or participate in union activities.
If they had their way, unions would require as many workers as possible to be union members, to accede to union control of their workplaces, and to pay dues to a union. In casual shorthand, this is known as the “closed shop.” (There are also the “union shop” and “agency shop,” which are limited forms of the closed shop. Under current law, only the agency shop is permissible.)
The closed shop in all its forms is flatly unfair to “forced riders”—workers who want something other than the union’s representation but have no choice but to take it. Unions only “represent” unwilling nonmembers because that “representation” increases the unions’ own power against management and decreases open dissent among workers.
In contrast is the “right to work principle”; namely, “that every individual must have the right, but must not be compelled, to join a labor union.” American workers should not be compelled to join and pay money (roughly $700–$1,400 per year per worker) to an economic organization that fails to serve their economic interests and to a political organization that fails to serve—and may outright harm—their political interests.
4. Unions have histories of corruption, and American unions have been unusually susceptible to infiltration by organized crime.
Union rackets are so extensive you can come up with a taxonomy to describe different types. Sometimes union bosses are simply padding their salaries with “double-jobbing” (which is generally legal). Sometimes they’re stealing from the union treasury. At worst, they might be agents of the Mafia, not the workers they purport to represent.
Unions’ ability to shut off economic activity—more accurately, to threaten to shut off economic activity—creates numerous opportunities for extortion. In industries with a proliferation of small enterprises, a savvy Mafioso can employ other racketeering tactics alongside the simple “nice business you’ve got there, shame if there was a strike.”
The good news is that outright organized crime infiltration of organized labor has declined alongside the Five Families and other old-line criminal syndicates. That hasn’t stopped union bosses from trying to rip off their members. The United Auto Workers saw two of its national presidents sent to prison in the 2010s for embezzlement, and “Johnny Doc,” a longtime union boss and Democratic political fixer in Philadelphia, went up the river for taking kickbacks from politicians he helped elect.
5. Unions have been given extensive government-guaranteed powers, and for that reason they should be subjected to public scrutiny.
Unions, almost uniquely among private organizations in the United States, can compel a form of membership and levy de facto taxes. (The only other type of private organization with this power that immediately springs to mind is homeowners’ associations.)
These powers are not natural. They are granted by government, specifically the federal National Labor Relations Act and state-level government-worker laws modeled on it.
This yields the second of three principles underlying the Taft-Hartley conservative consensus: Union finances must be subject to public and union-member scrutiny. Disclosure and scrutiny are the only way for union members, the public, and sometimes even the government to identify whether union activities are in members’ interests or compliance with the law. Since the Taft-Hartley Act and the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act, union financial activities are subject to this scrutiny.
Much financial mischief by labor union officials is perfectly legal and even encouraged by the government. For instance, Big Labor’s participation in the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement through using its pension funds to advance liberal policies in the corporate boardroom with disregard for its effect on beneficiaries’ rate of return is widely adopted by union trusts.
6. Union disputes can harm the broader public and therefore must be strictly regulated.
Don’t take my word for it: Take Harry Truman’s, and he was no enemy of organized labor. The Taft-Hartley Act probably owes its existence to a wild strike wave in 1945–1946 that saw 10 percent of the workforce strike. The strikes got so bad that when railroad engineers’ unions moved to strike in May 1946, President Truman compared their leaders to the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor, threatened to use the Army to operate the railroads, and threatened to draft strikers into the military.
Because the post–World War II strikes were so disruptive, the Taft-Hartley Act restricted the legal ends for which unions could strike. Most importantly, unions with rare exceptions could only call a strike to change the behavior of their own employer, rather than to coerce third parties with which their employer does business. Such strikes or boycotts, known as “secondary strikes” or “secondary boycotts,” are favorite tactics of left-wing groups allowed to use them. Their power makes them “the Left’s ultimate weapon.”
It is one thing for a labor organization to strike against its employer to jawbone the employer to make concessions. In the private sector, this is both customary and legally protected. But granting organized labor—either by negligence of duty as with teachers who refused to return to work during COVID or by design as with the PRO Act’s proposed restoration of the secondary boycott—more power to coerce the public ought to be anathema to conservative policymakers.
7. Organized labor is and always has been politically intertwined with American Everything Leftism, even if members don’t want to be.
The alliance between organized labor and the American progressive Left—and political movements more left-wing than mainstream progressive liberalism—goes back over a century. As the 19th century rolled into the 20th, socialist Eugene Debs and Western radical Big Bill Haywood briefly allied to bring the working class into the Industrial Workers of the World as “one big union.”
By the 1930s, the union movement was joined at the hip to FDR’s New Deal Democrats, but many of its organizers were secretly members of the Communist Party of the USA. The Taft-Hartley Act and the Cold War may have helped drive the old Reds out, but by the 1960s the United Auto Workers was midwifing the New Left.
Today, radical union activists put their multi-million-dollar institutions behind left-wing radical causes like Palestinian nationalism, Black Lives Matter, and transgenderism.
8. Supposed cleavages between organized labor and the American Left are not deep or exploitable.
Conservatives of a working-class bent often express hope that specific policy issues can separate certain unions from the general current of Everything Leftism that they admit runs through the rest of the labor movement. These hopes are vain.
Union members aren’t who these conservatives think they are. They’re not working-class men who work in traditional trades or factories (for the most part). Union members are almost half government workers, often highly educated women dispositionally inclined to progressivism. This is most obviously evidenced by the United Auto Workers’ evolution into the “United non-Auto non-Workers” by admitting (often politically radical) graduate students to replace its retiring factory men as dues payers.
So environmentalism won’t split industrial and building trades unions from their government- and service-worker comrades. Even the Teamsters push ESG resolutions on “just transition,” and given that all of Big Labor is eager for Big Government, it’s very easy for green activists to buy off unions with taxpayer money.
As for immigration, Big Labor flipped from its labor-market-restrictionist position to an Everything Leftist de facto open-borders position 25 years ago. And on social policy, Big Labor is all-in for full-spectrum social liberalism, including transgenderism, abortion, and gun control.
9. Government-worker unions, which make up roughly half of all union members, are a particular problem.
Unlike private-sector unions, which face an employer fully aware of its financial constraints in labor negotiations, government-worker unions face elected officials or their delegates. And government-worker unions are major players in politics, offering the chance to sit on both sides of the negotiating table by “electing the boss.” For the most egregious case of this in recent memory, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) now negotiates with representatives of Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former CTU lobbyist elected with substantial CTU spending.
Government-worker unions manipulate the fundamentals of elections, from partisan labels (or their absence) to the timing of votes to ensure their advantage in controlling local offices important to their power and status. In blue states like California, government-worker unions are their own power base independent of the rest of organized labor within the Democratic coalition.
Teachers’ unions absolute refusal to cooperate with school reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic vividly demonstrated the power of government-worker unions. By negotiating against the public and getting away with it, government- worker unions have made clear that they see themselves as above the public good.
While the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME codified the right-to-work principle in government employment, it has proven insufficient to protect the public good. The proper response to the abuse of power by government-worker unions is to abolish them.
10. Studying the history of organized labor matters.
The Left in general cares a lot about labor history, and they write most of it. Liberal states have made union history part of school curriculums, often with curriculum materials written by powerful labor unions themselves. Meanwhile, conservatives often ignore the history of labor unionism, content that the Taft-Hartley Consensus and Long Decline render it irrelevant.
Since those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, conservatives’ ignorance means that bad conclusions and bad policy guidance can be laundered onto the nominal right. If conservatives don’t know what they’re talking about, they might find themselves deceived by their political adversaries playing on ignorance.
In a final note, one cannot address American labor history without grappling with former Teamsters boss James Riddle Hoffa. His decade of Mob-backed rule at the top of what was in his era the nation’s largest union exposed the seedy underbelly of unionism, American-style. Even as public policy caught him and has sought to ensure would-be emulators quickly end up in jail rather than unions’ highest offices, his story is a warning. (Or at least it should be; his old union still hails him as a hero.)
