Editors at National Review Online highlight an important development in the history of the American workforce.
Labor Day this year is a cause for raucous celebration: For the first time, the share of U.S. workers who are union members has fallen below 10 percent. Looking only at private-sector workers, the share who are union members is 5.9 percent.
Those numbers are all the more remarkable because they come after four years of the Biden administration doing everything it could to boost organized labor. Biden called himself the “most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration,” and he was probably right, at least since Franklin Roosevelt.
The Biden administration bailed out union pension funds with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. It mandated union labor for infrastructure projects and baked union-favorable provisions into the CHIPS Act. It backed the “buy American” rules, prevailing wage rules, and protectionism that unions love. Biden’s NLRB appointees backed unions at every opportunity. And Biden himself was the first president to walk a picket line, joining UAW workers in Michigan in 2023.
Biden inherited a record-low union membership rate of 10.3 percent in 2021. It set a new record low in 2022 of 10.1 percent, then another in 2023 at 10 percent, and then another in 2024 at 9.9 percent. No other president has set a new record low every year he was in office since Ronald Reagan — impressive!
No matter who is president, the union membership rate has been declining for decades, and it has yet to see even a dead-cat bounce. That’s because the American people, by and large, aren’t interested in having union bosses skim their paychecks, give some of the money to politicians, keep some for themselves, and purport to be acting in their best interest when they know full well they aren’t.
