Unions like the Teamsters “wholeheartedly support” efforts by the federal government to bring a more robust manufacturing industry to the United States, but this will not dissuade workers from organizing for respectable wages and benefits.
The Trump administration aspires to a “golden age” of manufacturing, which it has attempted by enforcing tariffs on nations and products worldwide. Critics warn that aspects like automation, artificial intelligence, and blips in the global supply chain make such goals enviable but unrealistic in the long term.
A more granular concern revolves around where manufacturing booms would take place within the U.S., especially in southern right-to-work states that have seen development and companies relocating to invest in recent months and years. Those states have typically been more averse to encouraging union participation and contracts.
“We’ve seen action towards creating more jobs in the United States, and that is something that our Union wholeheartedly supports,” Kara Deniz, spokesperson for the Teamsters, told Newsweek. “We can’t organize jobs in China or in other countries, and there’s no chance of organizing jobs that are not here in the United States.
“If there’s a case where there’s job creation in non-right-to-work states, that’s fantastic. If there are jobs that are created by companies going to right-to-work states or places like the South, the way we see it is we’ve had a track record of success in organizing and we’re going to continue to have that.”
As of 2024, there were 26 right-to-work states, which signify places where workers are not obliged to join unions or pay union dues to sustain employment. States with such laws argue that workers should voluntarily have a choice whether or not to join and support unions.
The union membership rate, or the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions, was 9.9 percent (about 14.3 million wage and salary workers) in 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics—mimicking averages from the prior year. Compared to 1983, the first year comparable data were available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, with 17.7 million union members.
The highest unionization rates were among workers in education, training and library occupations (32.3 percent) and protective service occupations (29.6 percent).
“Unionization policy in the United States is based on an adversarial relationship between management and labor,” James Hohman, director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, told Newsweek. “This means that the unions are not looked at as an asset to improve production; they are looked at as an extra cost and extra liability—which is why we see often, but not exclusively, U.S. states with less union concentration are the ones who are adding more employment.
“That’s not exclusive, and there are success stories. The United States is 340 million people; it affords a lot of opportunity for diversity,” Hohman said. “Lawmakers ought to be focused instead of trying to force workers to pay unions [to] instead look to change union policy to allow voluntary association to create win-win situations between workers and their unions and management. That would make unionization assets rather than liability.”
Asked if some companies are deliberately moving operations to places like the South due to right-to-work laws, Hohman said the broader debate about a scarcity of American workers to fill factories “is a mistake or ignores the dynamic turnover of the American workforce.”
“There’s already around a half-million open manufacturing jobs,” he said. “They’re being hired. Well, also every month there are 300,000 people finding work in manufacturing, and roughly similar amounts of people who leave their jobs in manufacturing.
“That turnover means that companies should be able to find workforces, even if it seems like labor forces are tight. And in fact that competition for workers is going to drive wages up, it will drive labor shares of productivity up.”
Hiring and Maintaining a Workforce
Chandra Childers, senior policy and economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), published research in April about the exploitation of Black workers in the South and ongoing efforts leading high rates of poverty, low economic mobility, and high levels of inequality for workers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds in most Southern states.
Another focus of hers is the auto manufacturing sector, how it relates to southern workers and typical right-to-work states, and how they compare with states without such laws. Workers essentially have lower earnings that become more exacerbated based on differences in the cost of living.
“What we’re seeing is job quality overall is worse and so not just that wages are lower, but the weight that the purchasing power of those wages are declining over time—and then workplaces themselves,” Childers said. “I think this reflects a lot of the opposition to regulating workplaces in some of these states, that workplaces themselves can be much less safe in right-to-work states.”
She said one of the most alarming aspects of her research is that many auto manufacturers moved into the South, partially because of the good-paying jobs they would create.
“But when we look at the wages over time, the purchasing power of those wages are declining,” she said. “So, if you take what workers were earning 10 years ago…wages are declining over time as they’re moving into these states.
“That’s part of the reason they’re opposed to unions. That’s part of the reason you’re getting these right-to-work laws, is they want to be able to keep wages lower, they want to be able to not have to provide as many benefits and deal with interference by public officials.”
Deniz said the Teamsters have and will continue to negotiate for what they view as fair wages and benefits, mindful of expanding and unionizing more workers.
She also acknowledged that some large companies, specifically Amazon, have spent millions of dollars and engaged in “aggressive tactics” in attempts to bust unions. This is a common occurrence, she said, no matter the policies across America.
“I think a lot of that comes out of the fear of knowing that this is what workers want, and it galvanizes them even more to say, ‘This is ridiculous and exploitative,’” Deniz said. “We need to organize and change things.
“Out of that, you’ve seen this increased desire and interest and activity to organize coming out of the behavior of the greed of the corporations themselves. That is whether you’re in a right-to-work state or not. What you see is workers organizing to fight against that.”
Hohman said the discussion goes beyond getting enough workers into manufacturing facilities and offering decent wages. We inhabit a different economy than in years past and workers generally have more opportunities to thrive.
“A lot of the debate is the idea that some people are specialty cogs in manufacturing, whereas if their factory closes down, they won’t have good opportunities elsewhere—which is why we need to bring back manufacturing jobs so that they can have good opportunities to apply the trade and elsewhere,” he said.
“Well, the average worker in a manufacturing plant has a tenure of about 5.9 years. There just aren’t a lot of career people who have only worked in one place, and when one out of 17 workers every year finds a new gig elsewhere, people are clearly not specialty machines that are only valuable in one workplace. People have opportunities.”
He’s also apprehensive that protectionism will eliminate many employment opportunities, especially for people working in manufacturing trades that are integrated into global supply chains.
Childers said that some people have a nostalgic view of manufacturing jobs as good jobs, even though she argues that workers make the jobs palatable and companies a success.
“When we begin to see union rates increase, the pool of workers strengthens,” she said. “I’m thinking about the UAW [United Auto Workers] with the Big Three. They stepped back and made a lot of concessions because they didn’t want to destroy the automobile manufacturing industry. They wanted to preserve that, so they gave up pay raises, they gave up cost of living. They made a lot of concessions.
“But once they got to the point where the industry was making these high profits but not giving them their fair share, they were able to come together and demand that they get their fair share, they get those pay raises. I think it is a great example of showing what workers are able to do when they’re able to come together and bargain collectively with their employers,” Childers said.
Deniz, who, along with other Teamsters, is organizing across the South, said that years of corporations offshoring jobs or eliminating them outright could be corrected with a revitalized manufacturing industry at home.
However, that would require what she described as a real concerted effort to create work and for these companies to advocate for and support their workers in salaries, benefits, safety and health standards.
“It really begs the question of what it is that we want to see in our future in this country,” Deniz said. “Do we want to make more money for a small handful of already extremely wealthy people, or do we want to provide good jobs to create a middle-class lifestyle for people in this country and their families so that we have a higher standard for everyone and we can raise that standard?
“I think the answer is really clear about what the public wants.”
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