Confirmed: Unions Squandered the Biden Years
Welcome to single-digit union density.
Joe Biden was elected president in 2020 with the near-unanimous support of organized labor. Unions collectively spent hundreds of millions of dollars and ran massive door-knocking campaigns across the nation to help him win. And indeed, after he won, Biden spent unprecedented amounts of political capital on union priorities. He gave union leaders unprecedented access to the White House (at least in the first half of his term). He bailed out union pension funds, walked a picket line, appointed extremely pro-union officials to regulatory agencies, and in general did more to cater to the interests of unions than any president in the post-WW2 era.
Biden’s presidency, in other words, represented the pinnacle, the fullest embodiment, of the theory of power that has guided most big national labor unions for many decades: The belief that the path to increasing labor power in America runs through electing friendly politicians. This is the guiding principle of the AFL-CIO, this is what occupies much of the time and resources of most of the highest levels of union leadership. Elections. Republicans do not want unions to exist, Democrats are more friendly, therefore every election cycle is experienced by unions as an existential threat to their power. In constant fear of being crushed by hostile Republican laws, unions have poured billions of dollars into, mostly, getting Democrats elected at the national level. And Joe Biden was as good as this game has ever gotten for them. We just lived through four years of the fruits of this approach. It is not theoretical. We can now evaluate it on its merits.
Of course Biden was infinitely better for unions and workers than the alternative scenario of Trump winning in 2020. That is common sense, a question not even worth dwelling on. The question is not, “Should unions support Republicans or Democrats?” The real question is: Has achieving electoral political power translated into the growth of union power? Have the dollars spent on politics rather than on union organizing paid off? Does organized labor have its priorities in order?
Today, we can definitively say the answer is “no.” That’s because, this morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual measurement of union membership in America, the best statistical measure of the total strength and size of unions. In 2024, union density in America fell to 9.9% of the work force. In 1983, union density was 20.1%, meaning that organized labor is now less than half as powerful as it was during the Reagan presidency. This is the first time in generations that less than ten percent of workers have been union members. In 2020, union density was 10.8%. That means that over the course of the most pro-union presidency in my lifetime, not only did union density not rise—it declined into single digits.
We are losing. Despite having our bestest most favorite friend in the White House, we are losing. If this does not wake the labor movement up, what will?
My recent book, “The Hammer,” is in large part an examination of the question of whether the labor movement would squander the advantageous moment that we are now living through. Decades of rising inequality combined with the acute crisis of the pandemic have produced a 60-year high in the level of public approval of labor unions. We know, as a fact, that tens of millions of Americans want a union. On top of that, we had a supremely friendly president. The remaining task, the last thing on the table, was to go out and organize those tens of millions of workers into unions. All the popularity and political friendship in the world means nothing if the workers who want unions do not actually have them. As I traveled around the country doing book events last year, I would often say, “Union density right now is ten percent, and the next stop is single digits—and there’s no stop after that.” It was meant to be a warning. Now it’s the reality. Fuck me, and fuck all of us.
Until we succeed in raising union density, worker power will go down. That is bad, during an oligarchy. All of the political wins that unions got from the Biden administration were significant, but they were overwhelmingly things that helped existing union members rather than things that help us organize more union members. The responsibility for organizing the millions of Americans who want unions into unions rests with: unions themselves. Nobody else is going to do that organizing. Nobody. It is the responsibility of existing unions and the broader labor movement. That means that unions must spend every dollar they possibly can on new organizing. They have not done this. They did not do it, during the course of the Biden administration. They still are not doing it. As a result—by the standard of “increasing the power of organized labor in the work force”—the Biden administration was squandered by organized labor.
At some point it is necessary to wake up. If your goal is to get in shape and you do five pushups a day for a year and you still are not in shape, what is the rational takeaway? The rational takeaway is “I need to do more pushups.” It is not “let’s give this plan another ten years and see how it goes.” Yet labor unions, in aggregate, have failed to pursue new organizing in earnest for decades, and have watched union density continually sink, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, and now we are in the dreaded Land of Single Digits. There is still no real, coordinated plan from organized labor to source and spend the billions of dollars necessary to implement a real national organizing program at the scale necessary to raise union density. Until such a thing exists, we will continue to watch union density go down. Another way to say this is: Those of us who are lucky enough to have unions will continue to stand by and watch our fellow workers drown because they do not have unions to protect them, and we did not agitate enough to make our own unions do the work necessary to organize them. I am a part of the labor movement and I bear part of the collective responsibility for this failure.
Now Trump is president. He just, today, kneecapped the NLRB. That will make it more difficult to organize new unions. We all knew that this would happen. A good way to get ahead of this would have been to aggressively pursue large scale union organizing during the Biden administration. But we didn’t. Sometimes I fear I repeat myself of these points too much. The truth is the numbers speak for themselves. Unions have money. They don’t spend it on new organizing. Union density continues to go down. Unions get their best friend elected president. He creates a friendly atmosphere. Unions do not spend money on new organizing. Union density continues to go down. We with either change our strategy or we will accept that organized labor is no longer a powerful force in America. We will acquiesce to the oligarchy. We will either spend everything we have on organizing and fighting or we will cower in our little holes and watch as the working class suffers without our help. That’s what’s up.
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Related reading: We Are Failing; Ten Times This; Get The Federal Government to Fund Union Organizing; To Unfuck Politics, Create More Union Members. For more on how we can turn this around, you can read my book “The Hammer,” available for order wherever books are sold. If you want me to come speak to your union or school or other organization about this, email me.
Lest I sound too gloomy here, I should add: THE FIRST WHOLE FOODS UNION. FUCK YEAH. Workers can win! You can win! Organize your workplace! Contact a local union or contact EWOC or contact me if you need help reaching an organizer.
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You shouldn't worry about repeating yourself as it's a message that bears repeating. Thursday night I'll be giving a talk during the general assembly for our on-campus union where I'm going to be essentially imploring everybody in attendance to try to get at least three people to join the union. I fully intend to quote some things I've read in this newsletter.
We're in a deep-red state and as a result the union isn't able to negotiate on our behalf. While it's incredibly frustrating in many regards, it means we're already prepared for and experienced with the type of hostile environment that the current regime will impose. We're a wall-to-wall union, which is better for solidarity, and we have had success campaigning, organizing, and agitating around specific issues such as providing better health insurance by switching providers.
Our current campaign is for a CoLA and we've been able to gather support from people with vastly different political views from the majority of us because almost all of us are being taken advantage of regardless of our electoral preferences.
There is increased salience and visibility to labor unions that we may yet harness for a positive outcome. It's not over. As a physician, I have never wanted to be in a union until a few years ago - and now many doctors are coming around to this idea. If even we can change our minds, there are cultural tides that may yet turn more former skeptics into believers.
That said, as you correctly pointed out, even a favorable administration was necessary but nowhere near sufficient for meaningful change and growth. Union leadership has a lot of work to do.