The share of American workers in unions edged up in 2025, the first rise in years partly because of a slowdown in the overall labor market.
Union membership increased by a tenth of a percentage point to 10 percent last year, despite the Trump administration’s attacks on federal government unions and the agency that enforces collective bargaining rights.
About 14.7 million workers were union members in 2025, 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. The figure that represents those covered by union contracts, generally, is higher than union membership because workers are not legally required to join unions and pay dues. Yet all workers in unionized workplaces receive the benefits of a union contract.
The Trump administration took numerous actions last year aimed at weakening organized labor’s power. President Donald Trump stripped 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 flagging violations of the National Labor Relations Act.
Union membership had hit an all-time low in 2023 and again in 2024, despite efforts by President Joe Biden to expand union workers’ power. That’s partly because millions of nonunion jobs were created coming out of the pandemic as the economy reopened. But in 2025, the labor market grew at its slowest pace outside of recessions since the early 2000s.
Declines in union membership across the United States have been attributed to the shift toward a service-based economy, the influx of right-to-work laws and employer opposition to unions. Support for unions has soared over the past decade and was at 68 percent in 2025, near levels not seen since the 1960s, according to Gallup polling.
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