SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
nlrb
We Need Much, Much, Much Bigger Unions
But despite that broad public support, union membership has fallen steadily over the past four decades. Union density collapsed from 20.1 percent in 1983 to 9.9 percent in 2024, a record low. That’s a total loss of more than 3.4 million union members, from 17.72 million to 14.25 million union members out of a workforce of 88.29 million and 144.52 million, respectively.
The majority of the American public correctly sees this downward trend as harmful to both the country and the working-class. The slide also highlights the need for labor to dedicate more of its resources to organizing non-unionized workplaces rather than lobbying and political campaigns.
Our political system’s dependence on money is a serious structural barrier towards moving the country in a pro-labor direction. We see this in the massive deployment of economic resources at the federal level by lobbyists. And the disparity is jarring when you compare the federal spending by business lobbyists to labor.
From the beginning of 2020 to this past year, labor lobbyists spent more than $258 million, but this is dwarfed by the $17.1 billion doled out by the business sector. This is a ratio of 66 to 1 in favor of business. Corporate influence operations account for 86.7 percent of all federal lobbying spending, and they have zero interest in seeing the expansion of workers’ rights and power.
In other words, political spending is a losing game for organized labor. They cannot match the economic power of oligarchs and the corporations they control, leaving it with little political leverage and influence over our elected public officials.
Despite these structural disadvantages, the labor movement has scored some political victories. Unions endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020 and donated $27 million directly to his electoral campaign. This paid some dividends. The Biden administration bolstered the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in a pro-labor direction, increasing the agency’s funding and appointing dedicated workers’ rights advocates.
However, as noted by journalist Hamilton Nolan, the opportunity to expand worker power was squandered — a record low of union density was reached after four years of a favorable administration.
Now the organized labor movement is forced to operate in a hostile, anti-worker environment for the next four years, and the brazen attacks have already begun.
In his first two weeks as president, Donald Trump fired General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo and Board member Gwynne Wilcox. The latter dismissal generated a legal challenge, but until the courts settle the matter or a new Board member is appointed, the NLRB will remain a hamstrung federal agency.
The lack of quorum strips the Board’s ability to issue a number of important labor-related decisions that come across its desk and it leaves organizing workers vulnerable to both retaliatory attacks and illegal anti-union activities by corporations.
Research conducted by the Economic Policy Institute demonstrates that there are more than 60 million workers who want and are ready to join a union. Union resources need to be allocated towards organizing those workers, not politics. It would more than quadruple union density and increase the pool of resources available to the labor movement.
Organizing those 60 million workers strengthens our collective power, expands our dues base, develops more leaders, and increases our political influence. We can use our moral and material resources to combat the oncoming increases in the cost of living — thanks to Trump’s tariff regime — and the most unfavorable environment for labor organizing in recent memory.
Project 2025: How Trump Win Would Imperil Worker Organizing Gains Under Biden's NLRB
As Common Dreams has reported, Project 2025 is spearheaded by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and includes agenda items for continuing to roll back reproductive rights, imposing mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, and rolling back climate actions taken by President Joe Biden and other administrations.
The CAP analysis released Thursday details how the project would also push the White House and the NLRB to dismantle protections achieved for workers in recent years.
The general counsel would be among the federal employees whose jobs would be eliminated "on Day One" of a potential Trump presidency, threatening the NLRB's "ability to protect workers trying to organize for good, middle-class jobs," wrote CAP policy analyst Aurelia Glass.
Project 2025 also advises the NLRB to reinstate a 2019 standard which allowed many workers to be classified as independent contractors, leaving them without the legal ability to organize in the workplace.
"Project 2025 offers a playbook for how an administration could jeopardize the NLRB's ability to protect organizing workers."
The right-wing playbook would further hamstring workers' efforts to unionize by reinstating Trump-era rules that gave anti-union companies more freedom to fight organizing campaigns and allowed them to more easily avoid liability for labor violations by relying on staffing agencies and contractors to supply their workforce.
Glass noted that the Project 2025 agenda would weaken an agency that has been "a key part of the Biden administration's strategy for empowering workers."
"Crucial appointees are holding lawbreaking corporations accountable and helping reverse a decadeslong trend that allowed bad actors to bust workers' unions before they could form. Project 2025... threatens rolling back unions' success over the past four years," said Glass.
Analyzing NLRB elections data, CAP found that workers in 2024 have a better chance of winning union representation than at any point in the past 15 years, with the agency recording a 73.8% win rate—the first time in 15 years that a 70% victory rate has been surpassed.
Under the Trump administration, the win rate dipped as low as 64.4%, and with corporations employing consultants and lawyers specializing in "union avoidance," since 2008 the percentage of workers who won union representation in elections has been as low as 57.7%.
(Image: Center for American Progress)
Under the Biden administration, the NLRB has proposed bans on captive audience meetings, which require employees to attend to listen to anti-union propaganda, and surveillance for union organizers.
"Compared with this pro-worker agenda, Project 2025 instructs the next administration to eliminate procedures such as card checks, which make it easier to form a union, and would turn the administrative state against unions by accelerating the process to decertify them when workers have won a contract," wrote Glass.
CAP noted that by firing the NLRB's general counsel, a potential Trump administration carrying out Project 2025 would effectively punish Abruzzo and the agency for securing "more reinstatement offers for workers illegally fired for protected organizing activity in the general counsel's first year on the job than during the entire previous administration."
The Biden administration has achieved 8,285 offers of reinstatement for illegally fired workers—a 54% increase over the Trump administration.
Despite the successes of the past three years, wrote Glass, there is "always a risk that future administrations reverse course—and Project 2025 offers a playbook for how an administration could jeopardize the NLRB's ability to protect organizing workers."
Most Popular