Union Membership Ticks Up in 2025
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Rare good news for the labor movement. In spite of Trump’s attacks on unions, or perhaps because of them, for the first time in years, labor union membership ticked up last year.
The share of American workers in unions edged up in 2025, the first rise in years despite the Trump administration’s attacks on federal government unions and the agency that enforces collective bargaining rights.
Union membership increased by a tenth of a percentage point to 10 percent last year, because of successes in union organizing and slower labor market growth.
About 14.7 million workers were union members in 2025, an increase of 410,000, according to data released by the Labor Department on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the number of workers represented by unions rose to the highest level since 2009. That figure, which represents workers covered by union contracts generally, is higher than union membership numbers, because some workers opt out of membership in unionized workplaces, even though they receive the benefits of a union contract.
Last year’s union gains coincided with numerous actions by the Trump administration aimed at weakening organized labor’s power. President Donald Trump stripped millions of federal workers of their collective bargaining rights and canceled federal union contracts. He also fired a member of the National Labor Relations Board without cause, for the first time in the agency’s 90-year history. For most of the year, the board lacked a quorum necessary to consider cases alleging violations of the National Labor Relations Act.
Despite the attacks on federal government unions, union membership in the public sector grew in 2025 and continued to be about five times higher than the private sector, at 32.9 percent. That boost came, in part, from a rise in union membership in the federal government, as tens of thousands of civil servants joined unions amid attacks on their jobs from the Trump administration.
Two quick points. First, of course the workforce is a lot bigger today than in 2009, but it’s still good news to set total worker representation highs like this. Second, we’ve seen workers respond to anti-union attacks before by flocking to their unions. My own union for example, which was pretty sclerotic when I arrived here in 2011, only had actual membership in the 50s before the Janus case put public sector unions at risk. The idea for the anti-union people in Janus is that a national right-to-work (which really means right to leech off actual members) policy for all public sector unions would mean people would leave those unions since the union would still have to represent them, member or not, thus weakening the union. But what actually happened is that unions responded by actually organizing their members internally. My own union’s membership rate is now in the high 70s. Trump’s attacks on higher education in the last year raised that from the low 70s. Sometimes, people finally do get it through their skulls why unions matter. And it helps if the unions themselves actually do the work of organizing.
So good news, let’s keep it going.