§24 —
On Labor Day
Democrat
65,542
Here is the year the holiday is celebrating. Union elections fell to 1,372, down from 1,938 the year before, the fewest since 2021 1. Wins dropped by nearly 27 percent. The number of workers newly organized through labor board elections fell almost 40 percent, to 65,542 1. That is the national total. Not a state, not a sector — every worker in America who joined a union through an election last year would not fill a decent college football stadium.
And the mechanism itself went dark for part of the year. The National Labor Relations Board has five seats and needs three for a quorum. A member was removed in January, leaving two 1. A board below quorum cannot decide the contested cases that decide whether an election counted. So the holiday honoring organized labor arrives in a year when organizing fell by two-fifths and the referee could not, for a period, blow the whistle. Everyone gets today off. That is the last thing the movement won that everybody still has.
Sources
- Union elections fell to 1,372 in 2025 from 1,938 in 2024, the fewest since 2021; union wins down nearly 27 percent; workers newly organized through labor board elections down nearly 40 percent to 65,542; the five-seat National Labor Relations Board fell below its three-member quorum after a member was removed in January, leaving two — Bloomberg Law, Daily Labor Report ↑
Republican
THE DUES
The argument on this side is that the decline is a verdict, not a defeat: workers are free to organize and are increasingly choosing not to, and a holiday for labor does not require a labor movement. That reading has the raw numbers on its side. Membership sits at 10.0 percent, 14.7 million workers, little changed from the year before 1. Nobody is being marched out of a union hall.
But the same release splits the number and the split is the problem for this argument. Public-sector density is 32.9 percent. Private-sector density is 5.9 percent 1. Those two figures describe workers under one law, in one country, in the same year. If the decline were simply workers choosing, the choice would not sort that cleanly by who signs the check. Something other than preference is producing a five-fold gap, and whatever it is, it operates on one side of the economy and not the other.
Sources
“Labor Day. I've got the Bureau of Labor Statistics on one side and the labor board on the other and they tell the same story twice. BLS: ten percent union membership, 14.7 million workers, and in the private sector five point nine percent — call it one in seventeen. The board: union elections down to 1,372 from 1,938, wins off twenty-seven percent, and 65,542 new workers organized in the entire year. Sorry, one thing before you go. In January a board member was fired and the five-seat board dropped below three, which is what a quorum is. So for a stretch of this year the referee couldn't certify the game. We named a holiday after this.”— Lou
“Everybody gets today off, which is the joke and nobody built it that way on purpose. Labor Day. The one holiday named after the thing we spent a century dismantling. Union rate's ten percent — five point nine in the private sector, so about one in seventeen. Sixty-five thousand people organized in the whole country last year, in a country with a hundred sixty million jobs. Enjoy the barbecue. It was catered by people who couldn't take today off either.”
“Union membership reflects worker choice, and the fact that workers are choosing differently is itself a form of workplace democracy — and the board's composition is a personnel matter that I don't think belongs in a Labor Day conversation.”