Unions Are Shrinking Nationwide — But Not in California

The current state of unions across the country is a study in contradiction. On one hand, public support for unions in the U.S. is at 70%, just a tick off the highest mark in 60 years. Petitions for union elections filed with the National Labor Relations Board have more than doubled in the last four years.

On the other hand, the national membership numbers are down. It’s only a slight decrease, but it continues a long, steady decline. In 1983, the first year for which a comparable data set to today exists, the union membership rate among American workers was 20.1%. By 2024, it stood at 9.9%.

It is a steep slide — but there are outliers. California is one of them.

Over the last two decades, the Golden State’s union numbers have held relatively steady, and they’ve remained well above the national average. The state’s unionization rate — the percentage of all workers who are covered by a union contract, even if they’re not members — stands at 16.3%, more than five points higher than the national average, according to a new report by labor researchers at multiple University of California campuses.

“In California, the union labor movement is pretty robust,” said Enrique Lopezlira, director of the low-wage work program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and one of the authors of the report. “It’s a testament to the continuing efforts of unions here to organize workers and to really get engaged in state-level policy to provide better opportunities for those workers.”

It is grinding work, and as the full effects of Trump 2.0 begin to be felt, union workers could be placed under new pressures and left with fewer allies. But union strategies in California may nevertheless point a way for other states to weather the approaching storm.

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The new report, produced primarily by the Berkeley center and UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor & Employment, puts the total of California workers covered by a union at 2.67 million, or about one in six workers. That’s the largest raw total in the U.S., but seven states have a higher percentage of their workforce represented by unions: Hawaii, New York, Alaska, Washington, Connecticut, Oregon and New Jersey.

California, though, is noteworthy for its steady union presence. It hasn’t fluctuated much since 2005, despite the national decline. Further, the federal data set used to produce the union figures does not include home health care and child care workers who are classified as self-employed. In California, that takes in some 700,000 workers, even though their hourly wages are negotiated with individual counties through unions. 

In other words, the unionization count is almost certainly low. So what is California doing right?

Lopezlira pointed to a couple of areas. First, he said, major unions in California, including those in health care, education and public service, have aggressively and continuously worked to organize workers. The state’s highest unionization rate is found in education, where more than a quarter of all workers are represented.

California unions have also left a major mark on state labor policy in ways that benefit workers. The state’s historic fast food wage law was sponsored by the Service Employees International Union, as was a health care minimum wage. Unions have also sponsored or worked on the kinds of statewide issues — rent control, tenant protections — that are critically important to hourly wage workers. (Disclosure: SEIU is a supporter of Capital & Main.)

“I think the totality of our report is about how hard these unions continue to work to organize and provide benefits to their workers,” Lopezlira said. “Given all these headwinds — housing, health care affordability, technology, AI — the resiliency of California unions to look for innovative ways to help workers is critically important.”

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Those headwinds are incoming. In his second term in office, President Donald Trump has made no secret of his animosity toward unions. From his attempt to dismantle the agency charged with protecting employees and enforcing labor laws to stripping the rights of federal union workers, Trump’s war on labor is readily apparent.

It is a familiar tack. Organized labor’s declining figures — both in actual membership and the total number of workers who are represented by unions, even if they aren’t members — reflect decades of workplace rules and court decisions that have made it harder to unionize. They’ve been falling since shortly after President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981, a public-sector job action that nevertheless emboldened private employers to push back on unions more forcefully.

The most recent federal labor data is from 2024, Lopezlira said, so the University of California report doesn’t really account for anything enacted under Trump 2.0. “But the erosion of labor standards is a real concern — and going after the institutions that are meant to protect those standards [like the National Labor Relations Board], that’s an even bigger problem,” he said.

That may be all the more reason to look to the California approach. Union leaders in the state have pushed for years to strengthen worker protections and make it easier for workers to organize, and the high profile wage laws in health care and fast food have reminded workers of the good their unions can do.

According to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, roughly 60 million workers in the U.S. wanted to join a union but couldn’t in 2024. Recent organizing pushes at vehemently anti-union franchises like Starbucks and REI, meanwhile, suggest that the appetite for employee protections and fair wages is only growing.

“It’s a bit hopeful,” Lopezlira said. It may also be exactly what’s needed, especially now.

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