President Joe Biden, who has billed himself as the most pro-union president in modern history, has failed to arrest the decline in union membership rates or the drift of union voters to former President Donald Trump, who the rank-and-files increasingly sees as their champion, rather than Democrats and union leadership.
Biden said at the outset of his presidency that he aimed to oversee the “most pro-union administration in American history.” And he’s followed through with many pro-labor policies, including an overhaul of the National Labor Relations Board, a major bailout for union pension plans, tax-and-spending policies favored by labor groups, and much more. His administration has encouraged union formation, and he is the first president since Gerald Ford to see the number of union petitions increase on his watch.
But despite that, his efforts have not been sufficient to counteract long-running trends cutting against private-sector unions or to keep union households from responding to the populist overtures of Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance.
Republican critics argue that Biden empowered political union leaders at the expense of workers, driving a wedge between large organized labor heads and the members they represent.
In an interview, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who is the chairwoman of the Committee on Education and Labor, said that Biden has kept his promise to be the most pro-union president in history — but that he hasn’t been pro-worker.
“He has done everything that he can to strengthen the union bosses,” she said. “I don’t think he’s done anything to really strengthen the workers.”
Falling union membership
Although union experts agree that Biden has been friendlier to unions than past presidents, the rate of union membership was 10% in 2023, down 11% in 2020, the year before he came into office.
The decline has been driven by the private sector. In the early 1980s, about 17% of the workforce were in private-sector unions. That share has now plunged to just 6% of all workers.
For public-sector employees, for instance police officers, the decline has been less pronounced. The unionization rate was 37% in 1983 and 33% now, according to the most recent data.
The total number of union workers has fallen 36% since the early 1980s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Sean Higgins, a labor researcher at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, attributed the phenomenon less to people leaving unions and more to broader shifts in the economy away from heavily unionized industries.
Most important has been the trend away from manufacturing and toward new service-sector jobs that are not unionized. For instance, rideshare drivers for Uber or Lyft are not union members — nor do they even work for those companies.
“It’s not so much that the workers are sort of being shut down or laid off, that does happen, but it’s just simply the fact that as the economy grows that unionization doesn’t grow with it,” Higgins said.
“They don’t really know how to organize these new sorts of emerging economies,” he added.
Brian Riedl, an economist at the Manhattan Institute, told the Washington Examiner that he doesn’t think that declines in unionization in the private sector are a result of anything Biden is doing or Biden administration policies but of “changing workforce trends” and demographics.
“Younger people have generally been less focused on unions than older people,” he said. “Manufacturing employment decline has also contributed to fewer jobs that are typically considered union jobs.”
Shifting politics of union members
A key signal that Biden’s pro-union push has not paid political dividends is the shift in working-class union support to Trump.
The Teamsters recently released internal polling of its membership indicating that 58% support Trump, compared to 31% who back Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump’s appeal among blue-collar workers increasingly puts union members on the opposite side of the political fence from union leaders.
Dean Baker, co-founder of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, attributed some of that shift to demographic differences. Non-college-educated voters, for instance, are more likely to break toward Trump. He noted, too, that union members might blame Biden for problems outside of collective bargaining, such as high gas prices.
Inflation and the overall economy have emerged as the No. 1 issue for voters. Union members voting for Trump might see him as the better pick for their overall financial well-being, his union agenda aside, Higgins said.
But Trump has also actively courted union voters, especially by touting his opposition to trade deals and support for tariffs. Vance, in particular, has tried to forge a relationship with organized labor, including by joining UAW workers in a picket line in Toledo last year. Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes noted to the Washington Examiner the internal Teamsters survey and said that U.S. workers “know that President Trump is the candidate looking out for them.”
Riedl said union workers moving into the Trump camp doesn’t have to do with organized labor but is rather part of a “broader cultural shift” in U.S. politics, in which lower-income workers have gravitated toward an increasingly populist GOP that embraces tariffs and entitlement programs.
“I think Trump made it safer for lower-earning blue-collar union workers to feel safer in the Republican Party that their benefits and policies won’t be stripped. Trump is pushing tariffs harder than Democrats,” he said.
Biden’s pro-union actions
Biden and the Democratic Party’s grip on labor has slipped even as they have delivered for unions.
Notably, Biden has made the National Labor Relations Board more union friendly. One of the most direct ways that presidents can influence labor policy is through appointments of NLRB members and the appointment of the board’s general counsel.
Robert Bruno, professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, praised the current iteration of the NLRB under Biden. He told the Washington Examiner that the now majority-Democratic board and Biden-appointed general counsel, in his view, has “brought the board back to its original purpose, and that was to enforce the labor laws in this country.”
Biden has nominated pro-union board members at the NLRB. Both of his appointments previously worked as union-side labor lawyers.
Under Biden’s NLRB, the board rolled back many provisions that organized labor considers to be anti-union that were imposed during the Trump administration. Unfair labor practice charges have increased under the board and are up 7% just in the first half of this year. Additionally, ULP charges increased 19% from 2021, the first year Biden entered office, to 2022.
In 2022, Biden requested and was authorized the largest increase in NLRB funding in over a decade. The Biden-era NLRB also overturned a half-century of precedent to require companies to recognize a union if a majority of workers sign authorization cards.
Dan Bowling is a visiting professor at Georgia State’s law school who left Duke University after spending two decades teaching labor law classes there. He also considers himself a historian of the U.S. labor movement. He said that the NLRB under Biden has become staunchly pro-union.
“[Biden] certainly has appointed a general counsel who is almost radical in her pro-union support to a position which is, by statute, supposedly neutral,” he told the Washington Examiner. “The board members he’s appointed as their terms come up — they rotate between administrations — they’ve certainly been to the left.”
Biden appointed Jennifer Abruzzo as general counsel in 2021. She replaced Trump’s general counsel, who previously worked in corporate law, and Biden had fired. Abruzzo was born into a union family and worked directly with the NLRB for more than two decades, including helping workers file for union elections. She also worked as the general counsel of the largest communications and media labor union prior to her appointment.
Abruzzo has issued a memo declaring that college athletes can organize. She also pushed the board to declare captive audience meetings a violation of the National Labor Relations Act.
Biden secured another significant win for unions in 2022 when he announced that he was investing $36 billion in federal funding to shore up a union pension fund, the Central States Pension Fund. Without the federal bailout, hundreds of thousands of union members would have seen benefit cuts.
The president was also able to do so without a single Republican vote as the money came from the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package that Biden and Democrats pushed through in 2021 when Democrats held slim majorities in both the House and Senate.
Baker said that if Harris wins and continues to appoint union-friendly members like Biden has, it could stymy the trend of declining union membership in the longer run.
“For the fruits of this to be seen, it’s going to be a longer-term story,” Baker said.
Union publicity — another feather in Biden’s cap
The labor movement under Biden has also enjoyed success in efforts to organize new businesses and industries.
In late 2020, the first Starbucks store in the U.S. voted to unionize. That set off a wave of other efforts at stores across the country, and now workers at the company have won union elections at hundreds of locations.
In 2022, an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, became the first to vote in favor of unionizing, and, in 2021, a warehouse’s drive to organize a facility in Bessemer, Alabama, grabbed major attention.
There have also been some very public strikes and work stoppages that have generated public awareness since Biden entered office.
United Auto Workers struck at dozens of Ford, GM, and Stellantis plants across the country. UPS was under the microscope as the Teamsters pushed negotiations right up to the deadline for a strike to hit. And just this year, dockworkers across the East Coast and Gulf Coast went on strike for a few days, threatening to snarl supply chains ahead of the election.
Speaking to the growing publicity, last week the NLRB announced that petitions by workers to have union representation have exploded to 3,286 in fiscal year 2024. That is double the number of petitions that were filed in 2021, when Biden first entered office. Of note, Biden’s tenure saw the first increase in unionization petitions during a presidential term since the 1970s.
Baker said that one of the reasons that overall membership is continuing to fall despite more media attention to unions and rising numbers of union petitions is because there are simply less workers overall who are employed in union-heavy professions.
“They’re seeing declines in membership simply because the industries that are unionized are seeing a declining share of total employment,” he said, “so where you still have disproportionate unionization rates — manufacturing first and foremost — it’s a declining share of total employment. And that’s likely to continue.”
But he failed to pass the PRO Act
Biden entered office pushing for pro-union legislation that would shore up organized labor and, presumably, boost union membership across the country.
But he failed to sign into law the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, which would have been major shot in the arm for labor unions.
The PRO Act would enact sweeping changes to the employment landscape, including adjusting what kinds of workers can be classified as independent contractors, making it easier for gig workers, like those who drive for Uber, to organize. The act would essentially end “right-to-work” laws that have been enacted in 27 different states that stop unions from requiring that employees pay dues or fees, among other pro-union provisions.
But the measure, which saw staunch opposition from business groups, did not have sufficient support in the Senate.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“It is true, the PRO Act did not pass — that is always dependent on having the right number in Congress,” Bruno said.
Taken together, his presidency didn’t usher in a massive sea change or new golden era for unionization given continuing declines in membership, but his time in office has been punctuated by a union-friendly labor board, a marked increase in organizing interest, a pension fund bailout, and some splashy wins for unions in high-profile negotiations.