Unions Held the Line in 2025 Membership Numbers

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 feds asked 15,000 households per month whether they included a union member. Based on that survey, they estimated an additional 450,000 workers were union members compared to 2024, roughly half of them in the public sector and half in the private sector.

Some 14.7 million workers were estimated to be members of unions in 2025, which is 10 percent of the workforce, narrowly up from the previous year. An additional 1.8 million were covered by a union contract but were not members. According to analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, nearly half the growth in union membership was in the South.

But these headlines mask a grimmer picture. The new count doesn't account for how, in March last year, a Trump executive order suddenly went nuclear on federal unions, commanding agencies to ignore contracts and bargaining rights for the lion’s share of federal workers, totaling nearly a million, from VA nurses to fraud fighters.

Federal workers joined their unions at record rates to fight back, but their bosses now largely refuse to acknowledge their contracts. If these million federal workers were counted as effectively no longer having a union, 2025's numbers would look very different.

The report also averages out job numbers across the whole year. In effect, that undercounts an additional 200,000 federal workers who were pressured out of their jobs or laid off by the administration's chainsaw cuts to public programs in the final months of the year. (Labor Notes thanks two workers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for sharing insights on their methods.)

WINNERS AND LOSERS

In the private sector in 2025, the greatest union growth happened for construction (84,000 new members) and health care workers (78,000).

Construction unions grew from about 10 to 11 percent of their sector, as construction employment grew by a hundred thousand. The union share is still down from a decade ago, or even 2023. Last year's uptick reflects a data center building boom that was 70 percent of construction growth last year, along with public water and highway projects. New members might leave the unions if those unionized jobs don't continue, or if the building trades unions continue to struggle at organizing non-union contractors from the bottom up.

Health care union members grew in number, but the unionized share of the sector stayed flat at about 7 percent. Health care was the fastest-growing source of employment last year, adding half a million workers.

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The biggest losses in union membership came for logistics and manufacturing unions. The "transportation and warehousing" industry lost 100,000 workers covered by union contracts, even as jobs in the sector grew by twice that number. Anti-union Amazon and other shippers have been gobbling up deliveries from the unionized USPS and UPS, where closures and layoffs have hit hard.

In manufacturing, Trump's boast of a "Made in America” revival was a union-busting smokescreen. The number of factory jobs covered by a union dropped by 34,000. The number of total factory jobs grew by 33,000.

Despite being often trotted out for politicians’ photo-ops, mining and drilling workers got even worse treatment, losing 50,000 jobs in the sector, and their unions declined even faster, losing a third of their membership in a single year.

The number of workers participating in unionization elections through the National Labor Relations Board had been on the rise—2023 and 2024 saw the highest figures in a decade. But for 2025 this number dropped by 42 percent to just 82,625 workers, according to the Center for American Progress.

PUBLIC SECTOR QUESTION MARKS

Voided contracts for federal workers are the biggest asterisk in this year’s union member count.

Another asterisk: the workforce of state employees grew by an estimated 260,000 in 2025, including 180,000 more union members. But how much of this growth will last?

The state budgets of 2025 were built on federal support set in prior years. This year, massive cuts to federal support for Medicaid, food stamps, transit, and other public programs will leave states facing a devastating gap. Those shifts are sure to spell cuts to state and local programs, and the workers who staff them.

It's fair to take a bit of hope from the fact that union membership apparently grew in absolute numbers and roughly held the line as a share of the workforce, despite profound attacks. More workers joined unions to fight back. The total number of union members was the highest in nearly a decade.

It’s up to us to translate that number into power against the boss.