Trump Notwithstanding, America’s Unions Actually Grew Last Year

Earlier today, we learned that despite President Trump’s tariffs, the rationale for which is that they’ll limit imports and boost domestic production and exports, the nation’s trade deficit in goods reached an all-time high in 2025. Yesterday, we learned that despite Trump’s war on unions, which included canceling the government’s contracts with unions representing one million federal workers, the number and share of union members actually grew in 2025 for the first time in many years. One of the few sectors in which the number and share of union members did continue to shrink was manufacturing, where overall jobs declined by 80,000 last year, even though this is the one sector that Trump insists his tariffs will boost.

More from Harold Meyerson

That certainly doesn’t mean that all Trump policy is sound and fury signifying nothing; most of the time, it signifies dark and evil changes to life in these United States, which Americans must hope they can reverse. But some of the time, either because the effects of his policies are at odds with his intentions or because the policies cause so much popular pushback that their intended effects are negated, mere sound and fury they demonstrably—and in the past two days, statistically—are.

(All his ranting is indeed a tale told by an idiot, but that’s a separate concern I lack world enough and time to document here.)

The gains in union membership weren’t huge, but that there were any gains at all following decades of decline was news in itself. Union membership grew by 463,000 in 2025, which boosted the overall share of union members in the American workforce from 9.9 percent to 10.0 percent, while the unionized share of private-sector workers stayed steady at 5.9 percent. Most of the gain came among public-sector workers, whose unionized ranks increased in the local, state, and even federal government workforces. Almost any governmental entity is more open to its workers unionizing than almost any private employer. Elected governmental officials are answerable, after all, to voters—a public including union members—while corporate executives are answerable only to major investors and the looming gods of Wall Street. Even Republican elected officials support police unions, and a bill that overturned Trump’s executive order nullifying the government’s contracts with one million federal employees passed the House in December due to 20 Republicans who crossed party lines to join the Democrats in restoring those contracts. (Whether that bill can get the support of the 13 Republican senators required to surmount the Senate’s 60-vote cloture threshold if and when it comes to the floor is, to put it mildly, highly improbable. And there’s no way such a bill could get the two-thirds support required to override a Trump veto.)

How to explain this upsurge, albeit modest, in the number of Americans willing and able to join unions in 2025? The “willing” part isn’t hard to explain at all; the most recent Gallup survey found a near-record 68 percent of Americans have a favorable view of unions. That number rests on several sturdy pillars: the crisis of affordability, the growing loathing of corporations, and the sense that Trump is in bed with mega-rich CEOs, all of whom, very much including Trump himself, portend nothing good for American workers. It’s no accident that the age group that gives unions their highest approval rating is those under 35, which is also the age group that gives Trump his lowest approval rating.

But the obstacle to unionization is decidedly not Americans’ assessment of unions, which hasn’t been this positive since the 1960s. It’s the state of labor law, which now has so many holes in it that it effectively gives employers a free ride to illegally bust unions, most particularly by illegally firing workers involved in an organizing campaign. Our labor law now permits Amazon and Starbucks to refuse to negotiate with their thousands of warehouse workers and drivers, and with thousands of baristas, who’ve voted decisively to unionize their workplaces. Only the threadbare condition of the law originally written to enable workers to unionize if they wished to explains how the gap between 68 percent support and a bare 10 percent actual unionization grew so astonishingly wide.

Any American concerned about the declining share of the national income going to workers, and the rising share that’s been going to wealthy investors since roughly 1980—which has yielded those two groups’ respective decline and increase in political influence—must make the reform of labor law a paramount priority.

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