Unions were supposed to be having a moment when Joe Biden was president. He frequently bragged about leading the most pro-union administration in American history. While Franklin D. Roosevelt probably had him beat on that front, the Biden administration did adopt numerous policies to boost organized labor. Headlines hyping a union renaissance were commonplace, and the administration touted a surge in petitions to unionize.
What were the results? The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual report on union membership for 2025 on Wednesday, allowing for a complete appraisal of the Biden years. It shows that the union membership rate for all U.S. workers is 10 percent — down from when Biden took office in 2021. For private-sector workers, the rate is 5.9 percent, tied with 2024 for the record low.
It’s the continuation of a long-running downward trend in union membership. It has little to do with which party controls the White House or which labor policies a president pursues. The union membership rate has fallen during every presidential term since the 1980s. It fell by 0.4 percentage points during Donald Trump’s first term and by 0.3 percentage points during Biden’s term.
The only thing that seems to provide a small boost to the union membership rate is a recession. That’s because of how the rate is calculated. The BLS divides the number of union members by the number of employed workers. Union members are less likely to become unemployed than other workers when the economy goes south, so the lower number of employed workers during a recession makes the union membership rate go up. Protection from job loss during a recession might be a benefit of union membership, but workers on average don’t seem to think it’s worthwhile, because once the recession is over, the downward trend in membership immediately resumes.
Who are the workers who are left? They’re largely not in the “blue collar” industries that many people still envision when they think of unions. About half of union members work for the government, and that has been true for the past 15 years. (Working for government probably has more to do with not becoming unemployed during a recession than being a union member does.)
Local government employs more union workers than any other industry, by a lot. State government is the next largest employer. The category education and health services comes next, and even though it’s counted as a private industry, most of those jobs are closely connected to government programs. The federal government has more union members than the entire manufacturing sector.
More than 85 percent of workers in transportation or construction and more than 90 percent of workers in manufacturing or mining are not union members. Unions that were founded in those industries have been branching out.
For example, the United Auto Workers has had much more success organizing on college campuses than in auto plants, and it now has roughly the same number of members in the University of California system as it does at General Motors. In 2023, the trucking company Yellow, which had employed 22,000 Teamsters members, went out of business after the union fought a reorganization plan. In 2024, the Teamsters celebrated successfully organizing 9,600 new workers: nurses.
The BLS report finds that union members have $230 higher median weekly earnings than nonunion workers, but it notes that those figures “do not control for many factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences.” Other details in the report help explain why that earnings boost is mostly a mirage.
Union members skew older, with 45- to 54-year-olds as the most unionized age group. Older workers have higher earnings than younger workers regardless of union membership. Union members are also unevenly distributed geographically, with higher concentrations in higher cost-of-living states, where wages are higher for all workers. The union membership rate for full-time workers is roughly twice that for part-time workers, and working full-time will always earn more money than working part-time. The earnings difference also doesn’t subtract union dues from the calculation.
The best proof, though, is that if joining a union got workers a big pay bump, the union membership rate wouldn’t be declining for as long as it has been, even when pro-union politicians are in office. Union membership rates have been falling across the developed world as the global economy becomes more competitive and outdated forms of organization no longer apply. Unions stick around in government, where there is no competition and outdated forms of organization are the rule.
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