Two numbers describe organized labor in America, and they have spent four decades moving in opposite directions.
The first: 10.0 percent of American wage and salary workers belonged to a union in 2025. In 1983, the first year the government kept comparable figures, the rate was 20.1 percent—17.7 million people. The rate has roughly halved in forty years. bls.gov
The second: 68 percent of Americans told Gallup in August 2025 that they approve of labor unions. gallup.com
The distance between those two figures is the story, and neither one is a blip. Approval bottomed out at 48 percent in 2009, in the wreckage of the financial crisis, and has climbed for most of the years since. It has now spent five consecutive years in the 67 to 71 percent range—a level, in Gallup’s own words, last reached in the late 1950s and early 1960s. gallup.com Americans have not felt this warmly about unions in more than sixty years.
Approval is not evenly spread, but it is broader than most divides in American life: Democrats approve at 90 percent, independents at 69, Republicans at 41. gallup.com Two in five Republicans approving of organized labor is not the number the culture war would predict.
Membership tells the opposite story, and the private sector is where it is starkest. Among private-sector workers—which is to say, most workers—membership stands at 5.9 percent, unchanged over the year. Public-sector workers are unionized at 32.9 percent, more than five times the private rate. bls.gov Gallup’s own instrument reads the same reality from a different angle: 9 percent of Americans say they personally belong to a union, and 15 percent live in a union household. gallup.com
The most recent movement runs, modestly, upward: the Economic Policy Institute reports that union membership rose in 2025, including among federal workers. epi.org A tick, not a turn—but a tick against a forty-year slope.
What crossing the gap actually takes, one plant can show. At Volkswagen’s factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, plant-wide union votes failed in 2014 and again in 2019. labornotes.org In April 2024, workers there voted 73 percent to join the UAW; in February 2026, after more than a year of bargaining and a strike-authorization vote, they ratified their first contract with 96 percent support. newschannel9.com Twelve years separate the first failed vote from the first signed contract. At one plant, with a workforce that demonstrably wanted in, that is how long the crossing took.
Americans did not fall out of love with unions. Unions fell out of reach.
Comment
The Questions the Gap Leaves
A two-thirds approval rating and a one-in-seventeen private-sector membership rate cannot both be the whole truth about what workers want. Something sits between wanting a thing and having it, and the fivefold difference between public and private membership is the strongest clue about what. Public-sector workers are not five times more pro-union than their private-sector neighbors—they are often the same households. What differs is the rules they organize under, and what happens to an organizing drive once it starts.
The gap has a shape, and Chattanooga drew it: two failed votes before a successful one, a year of bargaining after certification before a contract existed, twelve years end to end. Multiply that shape across every workplace where approval outruns membership, and the forty-year divergence stops being mysterious.
So the questions this desk keeps on the ledger: What exactly stands between 68 percent approval and 5.9 percent private membership—the workers, or the process? And if the answer is the process, who does the process serve? The facts above are footnoted. These questions are ours.
What You Can Do
The numbers in this piece are public and free to check. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the union membership release each year bls.gov, and Gallup maintains the long-run approval trend. gallup.com
When this desk covers a drive that closed the gap—a workforce that approved of unions and then joined one—the before and after live in those two datasets. Watch them move.