Trump Notwithstanding, America’s Unions Actually Grew Last Year - The American Prospect

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Trump Notwithstanding, America’s Unions Actually Grew Last Year

 

Today on TAP: Only a pro-employer labor law is keeping millions of American workers from the benefits of unionizing.

 

by Harold Meyerson- The American Prospect -  February 19, 2026

 

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.

 

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.)

 

Full at:

 

https://prospect.org/2026/02/19/trump-union-growth-labor-law-organizing/