Keith Brower Brown

Unions Held the Line in 2025 Membership Numbers

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Blog
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Keith Brower Brown

For four decades, a federal count of union members has been the annual physical exam for the labor movement. Did we grow or shrink, and where?

The tally just came out for 2025. At face value, the number looks better than expected, given a year of open warfare on us from CEOs who want to automate everything and a bloodthirsty federal government.

The coming year could keep the strikes rolling through steel mills, state offices, telephone lines, axle plants, baseball diamonds, and hospitals from coast to coast. Union contracts expiring in 2026 could open up major fights by manufacturing, education, entertainment, and government workers.

One Battle After Another: The Big Contract Fights Coming in 2026

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People, mostly white, rally outdoors on building steps. Printed signs say "Kill the cuts, save lives" and "UAW says: Fight for our future!" Handmade signs can't all be read but one says "Science belongs to everyone."

On paper, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers has power like few other unions in the country. The “sparkies” have over 700,000 members. Most of them have held onto pensions, family health plans, and some of the best pay in construction.

IBEW ranks have grown steadily for nearly a decade on building sites and power lines. A longtime union staffer took the presidency of the AFL-CIO four years ago. While millions of other workers face threats of layoff by automation, Electrical Workers are booking overtime building data centers.

New Caucus Powers Up In the Electrical Workers

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Electrical workers in a tunnel.

One of the last nationwide bastions of union jobs is getting jackhammered by the Trump administration. Members are languishing in ICE prisons without trial. Programs that protect members from racism and sexism are getting the axe.

In response, building trades officers are split: some are pleading, some are protesting, and others are surrendering without a fight.

Confront or Cave? Federal Pressure Splits the Building Trades

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Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), the reform caucus in the Auto Workers, voted to dissolve at its quarterly online membership meeting April 27.

“It was a heartbreaking decision to come to,” said UAWD founder and chair Scott Houldieson, a 36-year electrician at Ford. “UAWD had become a caucus that is ‘resolutionary,’ and focused more on caucus discipline than on actually organizing workers. Meetings had become dreadful. We can have differences as long as we make a decision and move on.”

UAW Reformers Close Caucus, Launch New Organization

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View from back of an auditorium at UAW convention. People in red shirts sit in rows; one red hoodie front and center has UAWD logo on the back. Onstage, Shawn Fain is at the podium, someone in a suit stands near him, and other people mostly in red shirts sit arrayed at long tables on the dais. A big blue screen behind them has UAW logo and intials repeated, and some other images not clearly visible.

Rural Kentucky factory workers in the heart of the Southern battery belt filed for election January 7 to join the Auto Workers. More than two-thirds of the 900 hourly workers signed the union petition at BlueOval, a joint venture of Ford and SK On.

Electric vehicle batteries are a booming sector. If these workers succeed in building a strong union, they can set the standard to make these jobs worth keeping, and potentially build a base to take a clean energy transition further.

Battery Workers Organize To Safeguard Their Health

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60 people at tables hold papers high in the air

Stewards often build fights around small issues, and they need to. But stewards also have a special charge to stay ahead of the boss—to think big about shifting power on the job, including by driving the move to green production.

The union can fight smarter when it’s not just reacting to the boss’s plans—when members have talked over their own goals for making work different.

Stewards Corner: Organizing to ‘Green’ Your Job: What Works?

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In some of the most exciting fights of 2024, strikers shut down ports on the East Coast and backed up plane orders on the West. The coming year is full of expiring contracts that could keep the strike wave rolling.

ALIGNED TO FIGHT

The list includes some big contracts lined up so unions can bargain and possibly strike together.

The Big Union Contract Fights Coming in 2025

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Workers silhouetted against the sky march forward in a line, smiling. Some hold "CUPW" flags aloft. The view is looking up from near the ground, giving them a heroic vibe.

Twenty-one days without running water. A week before any cell service or internet. Hospitals closed, and thousands of houses swept away.

Not long after developers started trumpeting the city of Asheville, North Carolina, as a “climate haven” from coastal storms, the area experienced catastrophic flooding. Upland Tennessee and North Carolina were the hardest hit by Hurricane Helene on September 27.

In Hurricane Ruins, North Carolina Food Workers Organize and Fight

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A group of fifteen workers pose inside a warehouse among boxes of diapers and other aid material

Teamsters at Marathon Petroleum in Detroit have been on the picket line since September 4, their first strike in 30 years. Tankers filled with gasoline regularly exit the massive, belching refinery on a main Detroit artery, as Marathon continues production with supervisors brought in from other facilities.

You're Already On Strike. How to Turn Up the Heat?

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Striking workers and supporters hold signs that say Marathon Teamsters on ULP strike at a rally.

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