{"id":14723,"date":"2026-04-02T08:00:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14723"},"modified":"2026-04-14T03:08:31","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T07:08:31","slug":"2025-an-uneven-year-for-a-labor-movement-still-in-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2026\/04\/2025-an-uneven-year-for-a-labor-movement-still-in-trouble\/","title":{"rendered":"2025, An uneven year for a labor movement still in trouble"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>t wasn\u2019t supposed to happen. Almost all the pundits predicted their continued decline. Donald Trump did everything he could to undermine them: gutted the National Labor Relations Board; fired tens of thousands of federal employees, withheld money from \u201cblue\u201d states; stopped many of Biden\u2019s infrastructure projects; and a little too late threw the finger at a Ford worker. Still the unions grew. Almost half a million new workers<\/a> (463,000) gained union representation in 2025<\/a>. OK, it wasn\u2019t 1937, but it was the first increase of this size since 2008<\/a> when union representation increased by 518,000.<\/p>\n

While the growth of unions is necessary to strengthen the power of the working class, the numbers by themselves don\u2019t necessarily bring additional power to labor as a whole or even the unions that made the biggest gains. Without strong workplace organization, an involved membership, and a willingness to use the member\u2019s power to withhold their labor, the balance of forces between labor and capital will not change. As we will see below the growth in union members has not been equaled by an increase in strikes. Furthermore, the giants of those industries that have grown most rapidly in the last decade\u2014high tech and e-commerce in particular\u2014remain almost entirely non-union. The gains of 2025 are welcome, to be sure, but more is needed.<\/p>\n

Unions typically grow in periods of economic growth. 2008 was the last year of a period of growth as the economy plunged into the Great Recession in which union representation fell by 852,000 workers. 2025, however, was not a year of rapid growth. The U.S. economy has been in a period of slow growth for a decade and a half and 2025 was no exception. Many, including Trump, cite the third quarter increase in Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP from the second quarter as an \u201cannual\u201d jump of 4.4 percent. This official figure<\/a>, however, is fiction. The actual increase from the second quarter to the third was 1.1 percent. For reasons known only to the government\u2019s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), they \u201cannualize\u201d the increase by multiplying it by four to get an \u201cannual\u201d rate. Hence 1.1 becomes 4.4. Since the fourth quarter \u201cannualized\u201d stat was 1.4 percent, that quarter\u2019s real growth was less than about a third of one percentage point. The actual year-to-year annual rate for 2025, according to the BEA\u2019s own figures, was 2.2 percent.<\/p>\n

Union growth was about half and half public (236,000) and private (227,000) sectors. For federal and state public sector workers there was definitely no growth in employment. Trump\u2019s decimation of the federal workforce saw 283,000 jobs destroyed, while state workers lost 16,000 jobs. Yet, 40,000 federal workers and an amazing 180,000 state workers gained union representation last year. AFSCME claimed <\/a>to grow by five percent or about 65,000 members in 2025, though they don\u2019t say how many were state workers. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it was Trump\u2019s federal meat axe and threatened cuts of aid to states that sent a number of those workers running for union cover even as Trump stripped many federal bargaining rights in practice. Further investigation into this is needed to determine just how federal and state workers managed such growth. Local government employment, however, rose by 132,000, and union coverage increased by 16,000.<\/p>\n

The bulk of private sector growth was in Construction (84,000) and Health and Social Services (78,000). Together these two sectors account for over 70 percent of the increase in private sector union coverage in 2025. Department of Labor LM-2 reports for a few major unions show uneven performance for 2025. The Service Employees (SEIU) gained 87,837 members, the Auto workers (UAW) 17,286, and the Teamsters 3,440, while Steelworkers (USW) lost 20,058. In healthcare, the National Nurses Union alone picked up<\/a> about 13,000 new members between mid-2024 and mid-2025. In Michigan, SEIU<\/a> won representation for 32,000 privately employed home care workers in 2025, accounting for a big slice of the increase in union healthcare workers.<\/p>\n