Great union inflection point or dead cat bounce? Parsing the 2025 BLS union members survey

Every year, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics releases survey data on union membership in the United States. In recent years, the release has been a source of mirth and gloating for opponents of organized labor (including your correspondent), as they put to rest breathless media reporting on organized labor’s Miami Dolphins-style predictions that “this is our year.” But this year, the government shutdown-affected survey showed union density trended up; has the ghost of Don Shula come to lead the Fish back to the Promised Land?

No. Don Shula is not coming to save the Dolphins. And there’s no evidence that Big Labor is rising again either.

By the numbers

The headline bump in union density, the proportion of the workforce consisting of union members, isn’t much of one: From 9.9 percent to 10.0 percent, which the BLS press release characterizes as “little changed from the prior year.” Most importantly, the private-sector union-membership rate did not budge, remaining at 5.9 percent, and the total number of private-sector union members (7.4 million) was nearly passed by government-worker total (7.3 million) for the first time since the 2020 pandemic year.

Most is otherwise roughly as it was last year, when we used the BLS report to interrogate who actually constitutes Big Labor. But there’s more, as Washington Post editorialist Dominic Pino posted to the website formerly known as Twitter (I have cleaned up the formatting and omitted quotations):

• For the first time ever, the federal government employs more union members than the entire manufacturing sector.
• Local government is by far the largest employer of union members.
• State government is second.
• 7% of transportation and utilities workers… 88.9% of construction workers… 92.3% of manufacturing workers… and 95.3% of mining and extraction workers… …are not union members.

A pertinent question

Based on data like the data Pino highlights, last year I wrote:

The Current American Plurality that elected the present federal government is deeply interested in advancing the interests of men without college degrees. This is because many of them are men without college degrees: Exit pollsters broke down white voters without degrees by sex and found 69 percent of white men without a degree voted Republican compared with 57 percent of white voters overall. This has made policy entrepreneurs interested in serving (and perhaps one day leading) the Current American Plurality, especially susceptible to the special-interest politics of Teamsters Union boss Sean O’Brien and other, less Everything Leftist union bosses who offer strengthening Big Labor as a way to help that group.

But there’s a problem with that, and readers who have made it this far can probably already guess the problem from the information already presented. Labor union members are not much more male than the workforce as a whole, and other data show that they tend to be better educated. The BLS reports that men’s unionization rate is 0.7 percentage points higher than women. That ends up meaning that while 51.75 percent of the workforce is male, 53.5 percent of union members are—not a huge difference.

I concluded:

If the Current American Plurality wants to hold together, it will need to find ways to support workers as a whole, not cheaply chase the union members that BLS and other data reveal to be unripe for recruitment by throwing more traditional members of the coalition under the bus. The Taft-Hartley Consensus approach to labor relations, which Republicans have advanced for 80 years, offers the opportunity for those workers who freely choose to organize unions to continue to do so while protecting the rights of workers who choose not to form unions or choose to work independently. It should not be cheaply abandoned in service to myths about whom the conservative movement is seeking to court.

It is time to heed those warnings, and to their credit, some are. Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam commented, “Part of why it’s so absurd when Republicans decide they should swear allegiance to the leadership of the Teamsters” in response to Pino highlighting how low unionization is in various manual-labor industries.

The supposed “demand” on the right for appeasement of Big Labor comes from politicians hunting for political support for union bosses (an old, and failed, Republican tradition) and nonprofit groups funded by a gigantic progressive foundation based in San Francisco. It is not grassroots, and the BLS numbers on who union members are show why.