Gallup says 71 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, near a record high. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 10 percent of American workers are in labor unions, near a record low. What gives?
The first issue is that Gallup wasn’t asking whether respondents wanted to join a union themselves. In 2022, Gallup found that unions had the same approval rating as they do this year, but it also asked nonunion workers how interested they were in joining.
The most common answer, given by 58 percent of respondents, was “not interested at all.” Only 11 percent said they were “extremely interested.”
That answer was remarkable because it was during the administration of President Joe Biden. Between implementing a pro-union overhaul of the National Labor Relations Board, requiring the use of unionized labor for many federally funded projects, bailing out union pension funds and walking the picket line with striking autoworkers, Biden clearly meant it when he said he wanted to be the “most pro-union president.”
Though there was an increase in NLRB union election petitions under Biden, the union membership rate fell slightly during his presidency, from 10.3 percent in 2021 to 9.9 percent in 2024.
That’s hardly surprising. Democrats and Republicans have pursued very different labor policies, but no matter which party controls the White House, the union membership rate has gradually fallen for decades. Since 1960, the only presidency when the rate increased was Donald Trump’s first, but that was an anomaly due to nonunion workers losing their jobs at higher rates during the first months of the covid pandemic.
Different countries have very different labor policies as well. The United States has an unusually low union density. The average is 15 percent across members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and rates in European countries tend to be higher than that.
But the trend of declining union density is typical across the developed world. There are hardly any exceptions, and several other countries, including Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom, have seen steeper declines than the U.S. since 1990.
As countries become richer, employment shifts to the services sector and away from the industrial sector. Since many unions and labor-relations laws were set up with the industrial sector in mind, that transition has been hard on unions almost everywhere. The OECD noted that the only countries where union density was above or close to 50 percent in 2024 were ones such as Denmark, Finland and Iceland, where unemployment insurance is administered through union-linked institutions instead of the government.
Where union membership has been durable is in the public sector. Even in countries with higher overall rates than the U.S., it’s common for the government to have a much higher union density than private industry. The OECD average is 41.3 percent for government workers, compared with 10.1 percent for private-sector workers.
In the U.S., about half of union members work for government. Union membership is most common in local government (37.8 percent) of workers, followed by state government (29.6 percent) and federal government (27.2 percent).
Government unions are completely different from private-sector unions. Governments don’t make profits, obviating the typical union task of bargaining for a bigger share of the employer’s profit. Instead, these unions bargain against a jurisdiction’s taxpayers, seeking greater government spending and more expansive programs. Thus, government unions are not so much labor groups as they are political organizations.
Though the trend of declining union density is common, there is one U.S.-specific factor that contributes to unions’ unpopularity here: corruption.
As pro-union labor historian Robert Fitch wrote in “Solidarity for Sale,” his 2006 book on American union corruption, “You don’t find gangsters running European unions.” Decades of prosecuting organized crime has led to fewer mobbed-up unions than in the past, but criminal behavior by union leaders is not ancient history.
Just last week, Kimberly Goodwin, a former local president of the American Federation of Government Employees, who represented workers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, was convicted of stealing about $1 million from the union.
In June, Newton Jones, who was international president of the Boilermakers Union for two decades, was convicted of embezzling millions of dollars to fund exorbitant personal expenses and no-show jobs for cronies.
The United Auto Workers has operated under federal government supervision since 2021, the year two former presidents of the union were sentenced to prison. The court-appointed monitor alleged this year that current president Shawn Fain is abusing his power, which Fain denies. The Justice Department is investigating.
A nine-month investigation by Politico published last year found evidence that George Gresham, longtime president of the massive East Coast health care union 1199SEIU, used the group’s funds to pay for concerts near his annual family reunions, his daughter’s travel and Jesse Jackson’s medical bills. The union denied having broken the law. When Gresham died in May, the union celebrated his “dedicated leadership, deep commitment to social justice, and faithful service.”
As Americans have fled unions, workers themselves are making more money than ever. The average American worker made $86,977 in wages in 2025. Adjusting for purchasing power, only the average worker in Iceland, Luxembourg or Switzerland made more.
A high union approval rating with a low union membership rate is another case of the disconnect between Americans’ opinions of their own financial situations (pretty good) and their opinions of the economy in general (pretty bad). Americans think unions are a nice idea — for other people. And the gap between what they imagine unions could be and what they actually are does not compel them to sign up to these relics of a bygone economy.
The post Americans approve of unions. They just don’t want to join one. appeared first on Washington Post.
