What a Union Actually Does (and Why the Boss Hires Consultants to Stop One)

Ten percent of American wage and salary workers belonged to a union in 2025, about 14.7 million people. In 1954, the recorded high point, the rate was 28.3 percent of employed workers, a different measure of the workforce than today’s figure but pointed at the same decline: every version of the union density series falls from the 1950s onward, without a real interruption. A union does three specific things once workers actually get one: it bargains a contract, it enforces that contract through a grievance procedure, and it gives workers a formal voice on safety before someone gets hurt. Most of the seventy-year decline traces to what happens before any of that, at the fight over whether a workplace gets a union at all.

What the card actually buys

Once a majority of workers at a job choose a union, three things start happening that were not happening before. A bargaining committee made up of coworkers, not outside officials, sits across the table from company negotiators and writes the actual contract: pay scales, scheduling rules, health coverage, seniority. A grievance procedure gives that contract teeth after it is signed. When a manager violates or misreads it, a worker, often through a shop steward (the elected coworker who handles this job), files a formal complaint that moves up the chain and, if it stalls, ends in arbitration before a neutral outsider instead of the boss’s own judgment. And in workplaces where the job can put someone in the hospital, more contracts now write in a joint health and safety committee, workers and management walking the floor together instead of the employer inspecting itself.

None of it is automatic, and none of it is free: a union has to win a fight just to exist in the first place. Without one, the same three questions (what will I be paid, what happens if the contract gets broken, who decides whether this job is safe) get answered by the employer alone, every time.

The law that makes it possible

The right to do any of this at a private employer has been federal law only since July 5, 1935, when Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, written by Senator Robert Wagner of New York. The law commits the government to encouraging collective bargaining by protecting workers’ freedom of association, gives employees the right to organize and bargain collectively, and protects coworkers acting together over pay or conditions even where there is no union at all. It created the National Labor Relations Board to run union elections and investigate unfair labor practice charges, and it carries a right fewer people know they have: in an investigatory meeting that could lead to discipline, a worker can demand a coworker sit in the room, a protection nicknamed Weingarten rights after the Supreme Court case that created it.

This was new law, not a restatement of an old norm. Before 1935, the standard employer answer to organizing was the one Eugene Debs’s American Railway Union met in 1894: a federal injunction and the Army. Wagner’s law replaced the injunction with an election.

Twelve years later, Congress narrowed it

The law did not stay where Wagner left it. On June 23, 1947, a Republican Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Truman’s veto, and it is still the framework unions organize under today. Taft-Hartley outlawed the closed shop, a workplace where a worker had to already belong to the union to get hired, but allowed a union shop, where a new hire gets 30 days before dues start, unless a state passes its own right-to-work law banning even that; 26 states now have one. It also banned secondary boycotts, workers picketing a company that does business with the employer they are actually fighting, which is one reason a single striking workplace rarely pulls a wider one in anymore the way it briefly could during the sit-down strikes that built the United Auto Workers in the 1930s. The same law is a large part of why a walkout spreading across a whole city or industry, a general strike, has been close to nonexistent in the US since 1947, not 1937.

Where the membership went

Union density hit its recorded peak, 28.3 percent of employed workers, in 1954. The raw number of members kept climbing for another quarter century, peaking at an estimated 21.0 million people in 1979, before both measures turned down for good. By 2025 the overall rate was 10.0 percent, 14.7 million people, and the two halves of the workforce sat almost exactly even: 7.4 million union members in the private sector and 7.3 million in government jobs, nearly equal for the first time since 2020. The private-sector rate on its own, 5.9 percent, is a hundred-year low. Government unionization carried nearly all the weight the private sector used to.

The industry built to keep it that way

Part of the decline is structural: manufacturing, historically a union stronghold, shed jobs to automation and offshoring for decades. Part of it is a business. A December 2019 investigation by the Economic Policy Institute, built on federal disclosure filings employers are required to submit, put employer spending on “union avoidance” consultants at $340 million a year, with consultants billing $350 an hour or more, sometimes $2,500 a day, for one job: stop an election before it happens, or make sure workers vote no if it does. The Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas spent $569,000 on the practice between 2015 and 2016. In 2019, facing a wave of internal worker dissent, Google retained IRI Consultants, the New York Times reported, the same firm documented elsewhere compiling personal dossiers on workers (family status, finances, health problems, a one-to-five score on how likely each one was to vote union) so managers knew exactly who to talk to and about what.

More popular than joined

None of this squares with what Americans actually say about unions. Gallup’s 2025 poll put approval of labor unions at 68 percent, the fifth straight year in a stretch between 67 and 71 percent, a run the country had not sustained since the early 1960s. Approval had bottomed out at 48 percent in 2009 and has not come close to that number since. Sixty-eight percent of the country likes the idea; ten percent of it has the card.

The current wave

Some of the recent growth is coming from workplaces the labor movement had barely touched before. On December 9, 2021, workers at a Starbucks on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo voted 19 to 8 to unionize, the first of the company’s more than 8,000 corporate US stores to do so, joining Workers United, an SEIU affiliate. Within a few years, Starbucks Workers United represented more than 655 stores in 45 states and Washington, DC, over 14,000 workers. None of those stores had a first contract yet; the union filed a bad-faith bargaining complaint against the company in December 2024, which is the honest footnote every union election needs. Winning the vote and winning a contract are two different fights, run under two different parts of the same law.

Amazon workers wrote the other headline of the wave. On April 1, 2022, warehouse workers at the JFK8 facility on Staten Island voted 2,654 to 2,131 to unionize, the first Amazon warehouse in the country to do so, organized entirely outside the traditional labor movement by the independent Amazon Labor Union under Christian Smalls, a JFK8 worker Amazon had fired in March 2020, the same day he organized a walkout over COVID-19 safety protocols. Smalls spoke to reporters the day the votes were counted:

It’s always going to be Amazon versus the people. And today, the people have spoken, and the people wanted a union.

What the numbers add up to

The Fight for $15 campaign, which started with just over 100 fast-food workers walking out in New York City on November 29, 2012, showed wages can move before a single NLRB election happens, through public pressure and state legislatures. A signed union contract does something that kind of campaign cannot: it puts the raise, the grievance procedure, and the safety committee into a document a neutral arbitrator enforces if the employer breaks it. A signed document is exactly what $340 million a year is spent trying to prevent.