Labor’s Gains?

In 2023, a “banner year” for labor in many regards, only 115,551 workers voted in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation elections, out of roughly 160 million workers in the United States labor force. In FY 2018, that number was 84,505, and in FY 2013, 85,290. Union density today sits at a historic low of 10 percent, with only 6 percent density in the private sector. A mere 1 percent increase in union density would mean that a fresh 1.6 million workers are organized with no losses elsewhere, before accounting for growth in the labor force. Even if unions won every 2023 NLRB election (which they did not), this rate of growth would have been far less than the increase in the civilian labor force, which, in the full employment years of 2015–19, averaged around 1.5 million new workers annually. 

While there has been a reported uptick in union activity, any casual observer can see that no great reversal in the union density trend is in the offing on our current trajectory. Figures on recent organizing show plenty of evidence that changes are required if the American labor movement is to grow at anything approaching the establishment of a new balance of power in the labor market. Broad strategic reconsiderations are needed to address labor’s impasse.

Within the framework of the National Labor Relations Act, the NLRB is authorized to process union representation elections in the private sector, which employs the vast majority of workers in the US (roughly 85 percent). If the labor movement is going to take advantage of the present popular approval for labor unions and interest in labor organizing, it must go after big targets in the private sector, shops where workers can potentially be added to union rolls en masse. Historically, the labor movement has not grown in gradual fashion but in large spurts. As labor historian Erik Loomis has commented, “There are too many workers in America to rebuild the labor movement in groups of twenty or thirty or even one hundred. You need thousands and thousands of people to be joining the labor movement at the same time.” 

UAW International Representative Michael McCown was a lead organizer on the union’s successful bid to organize the University of California system, which netted 16,000 researchers across multiple campuses. He also worked in Chattanooga for about three months, helping push the recent victory at Volkswagen to the finish line. For McCown, taking advantage of renewed enthusiasm for unions requires larger victories. “I don’t think the labor movement has much of a future if we’re just organizing small units. Whenever you see people who want to form a union, you want to help. But if we’re going to have any kind of class power, we must organize the large-units.” Understanding how best to grow given the current confines of federal law is therefore of paramount importance. 

Union elections

I analyzed the NLRB’s “large-unit elections”—those involving 500 or more eligible voters—over the past ten years. For fiscal years 2020–2023, these accounted for, on average, 1.5 percent of all elections. By contrast, small shop organizing (i.e., units of twenty-five or under) made up a solid majority of all elections—58.5 percent of the total number of elections in FY 2023, but these elections only involved 10 percent of all eligible voters. By contrast, the twenty-four large-unit elections that fiscal year accounted for 43.5 percent of all eligible voters.

Averages of Certified NLRB Elections Between FY2020–2023

The number of 500+ worker elections remained fairly stagnant between 2014–2020. After the pandemic drought of 2021, the number of large-unit elections has been increasing, with twenty-two in 2022 and thirty-two in 2023. Projecting out from the current data, we are scheduled to have about the same number (over thirty) this year. 

This uptick coincides with a similar rise in victory percentage. Unions have become quite good at winning large-unit elections. From 2014–2021, 63 percent of large-unit certification elections (as opposed to decertification and employer-petitioned elections) were successful. From 2022 through the present, since the cultural vogue for union organizing has taken hold, that success rate has risen to an astounding 86 percent. Not only has the total number of workers petitioning the federal labor board for certified union elections slightly increased in the Biden recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, but those who do so in large groups are also finding victories at a rate unseen in generations. 

What’s intriguing about these results is that the composition of large-unit elections has changed considerably—by far the largest sectors involved in large-unit organizing are academic and healthcare unions. Healthcare unions have consistently run a large number of such certification elections over the past decades. But the more noticeable trend is in the marked increase in academic elections, culminating in a wave of very large-unit victories in 2022 and 2023. 

What explains the particular interest in organizing among healthcare and academic workers? Amy Gladstein, 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East (UHE)’s Assistant for Strategic Organizing, chalks up a small part of recent labor organizing activity to a friendly National Labor Relations Board but attributes the main impetus behind new organizing success among healthcare workers to the aftereffects of the Covid-19 pandemic: 

I would ascribe a lot of it to Covid, and to healthcare workers feeling like they were abused. They didn’t have enough personal protective equipment, and they weren’t recognized in the way that healthcare workers want to be recognized, which is respect and input on the job and monetary compensation. 

Large hospital campaigns sometimes stall in not being able to penetrate certain departments, but pandemic frustrations were felt across departments, thus uniting workers across common interests. While academic workers were not affected by the pandemic in quite the same way, they too have recently seen great large-unit successes. In a four-month period between November 2022 and March 2023, unions racked up nine victories covering more than 20,000 academic workers. Measly stipends and pay in cities that are increasingly expensive for academic workers with dire career prospects are typically cited as motivating factors, but these conditions apply to other workforces as well. Perhaps there is some ideological predisposition among graduate students to organize. Other credentialing junior professionals, like medical interns and residents, are also organizing at a rapid clip, indicating possible structural factors at play.

Divergent trends

For some, these results confirm the idea that opportunity for organized labor lies in the post-industrial growth of semi-public healthcare and education services. As promising as these growth areas might be, however, healthcare and education services make up a total of 14.8 percent of employment in the US. For the remaining 85.2 percent of workers the news is not so good, as the number of all other large-unit certification elections besides those in healthcare and academia have declined, including those in other service sector areas like retail. The data indicates that the much discussed labor upsurge of recent years is only a segmented break from the broader decline of labor that has characterized the last fifty years, which appears to be continuing apace outside of healthcare and academia. 

Unsurprisingly, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) ran the most large-unit certification elections in the last decade (fifty-four), followed by the United Auto Workers (UAW) with twenty-three, and the United Electrical Workers with twelve. 

NLRB 500+ Worker Certification Elections By Union, 2014–Present

Of SEIU’s large-unit wins, 63 percent have been in healthcare, but the union has also won large-unit elections for academics, janitors, and airport service workers, not to mention its seeding of Workers United, which among other things has recently brought Starbucks to the table. SEIU has become very successful at winning large hospital campaigns in recent years: their Committee for Interns and Residents (SEIU-CIR) has won six large-unit elections since 2022, and SEIU-UHW is quickly organizing the Sharp Healthcare system (with 1000+ worker hospital units) in southern California. Gladstein’s local, 1199SEIU-UHE, has won a few such victories in recent years, including a 948-person unit at WestMed Medical Group in Yonkers, NY, earlier this year. 

The other major international running large-unit campaigns is the UAW, better known recently for its successful Stand-Up Strike on the Big Three automakers, its commitment to new organizing, and its major win at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, TN, for 4,326 workers. Despite these important victories in its namesake industry, 52 percent of the UAW’s large-unit wins in the last decade have come from academia. 

What would it take to reverse the decline of large-unit organizing beyond healthcare and academia? This is one facet of the broader question of how to reverse labor’s decline, which no one today can claim to have solved. There may be lessons from recent large-unit victories that can be shared among unions and port to other contexts. As in the case of the UAW at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, which lost a few times before it finally won, such lessons might take years to bear fruit, but the seeds must be planted now.