Union membership continued to fall in 2024, hitting new low

The share of American workers in unions edged down in 2024, reaching its lowest level on record, even as the year was marked by a surge in union election filings and several high-profile strikes.

The union membership rate dropped by one-tenth of a percentage point, to a new low of 9.9 percent last year, the Labor Department said Tuesday, while the total number of union members in the United States barely budged last year, with a loss of roughly 100,000 members.

About 14.3 million workers were in unions in 2024, according to the Labor Department.

The decrease in the union membership rate happened in part because a solid labor market added 2.2 million jobs in 2024, with nonunion positions growing at a faster pace than union ones.

The private sector lost about 184,000 members in 2024, while the public sector gained about 15,000 members.

Union membership had hit an all-time low in 2022 and again in 2023, largely because of a massive jobs boom coming out of the pandemic as businesses reopened. Most newly formed businesses start off without unions, and then workers have the option to organize and vote to unionize, which takes time and resources.

Former President Joe Biden made it a top priority of his administration to expand union workers’ power, though that did not translate into higher union membership. Biden appointed a leader at the National Labor Relations Board, who took an aggressive approach to expanding union rights and going after major corporations such as Amazon and Starbucks for alleged illegal union-busting. Filings for union elections doubled, and union victories reached their highest level in a decade under his administration.

But many labor experts say union membership is likely to continue falling without reforms to labor laws written in the 1930s and 1940s.

Decades of declining union membership has been attributed to the shift toward a service-based economy, the influx of right-to-work laws and fierce employer opposition to unions. That contrasts with growing evidence that Americans are on the side of labor unions. Support for unions has soared over the past decade, and was at 70 percent in 2024 – near levels not seen since the 1960s, after hitting a record low during the Great Recession, according to Gallup polling.

Many labor unions have been bracing for the new administration to be hostile to unions and to swiftly reverse recent decisions that have made it easier for workers to unionize. Trump fired Biden’s NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo on Monday. But there are signs that Trump, who has made inroads with some unions, may be sympathetic toward certain wings of organized labor.

The decline of union membership rates, a widely used indicator of union power, has been going on since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting data in 1983. At their peak in the 1950s, unions represented more than 1 in 3 workers in the United States.