The years immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic presented the ripest conditions for a labor resurgence in generations.

As the country emerged from the acute phase of the pandemic, deferred demand for goods and services pushed unemployment down and shifted power toward workers and away from employers desperate to keep stores staffed and production lines running. Help-wanted signs blanketed fast-food establishments, car dealerships, and big box stores, each one promising higher pay. Workers job-hopped by the millions, bidding up wages and contributing to the first period of falling inequality in decades. Pandemic relief programs cushioned workers’ accounts as they searched out the best deal—and took risks in the workplace, including by organizing in unlikely quarters.

One of the labor movement’s biggest victories during this time occurred in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the United Auto Workers (UAW) successfully organized a Volkswagen plant in spring 2024. That breakthrough victory, occurring just five years after workers rejected a prior attempt at the same factory, produced widespread coverage documenting labor’s “historic,” “seismic,” and “milestone” win, and congratulations from the sitting U.S. President, Joe Biden. It also produced roughly 4,000 new dues-paying members, a significant haul for a labor movement that had grown accustomed to playing defense over decades of decline.

Many certainly hoped that the combination of a red-hot labor market, a leader who described himself as “the most pro-union President in American history,” and high-profile victories at name-brand companies between 2021 and 2024 would reverse labor’s steady losses in the private sector. It didn’t. Private-sector union density fell during this period, from 6.1 percent to 5.9 percent, where it sits today.

What was lost amid the fervor about “labor’s resurgence” was the fact that the core barriers to revitalizing unions in the private sector remained firmly in place in the United States, and nearly everywhere else. For what’s exceptional about our labor movement isn’t so much its beleaguered state when it comes to the private sector: It’s how few public-sector workers are organized. Private-sector unions have struggled in nearly every single advanced economy for decades now. The good news this Labor Day is that there is room for growth—just not where the movement and its allies have directed so much hope and attention. Instead of focusing on car factories, the movement should target public-sector employees: K-12 teachers, health-care workers, building cleaners, social workers, and others who don’t currently belong to a union but would if they could.

Employers Strike Back

The UAW’s southern march stalled after its Tennessee breakthrough. An election at an Alabama Mercedes plant ended up in a double-digit defeat for the union. The UAW allocated tens of millions of dollars to organize over a dozen other Southern plants, but as of today, the Volkswagen factory stands as its one and only beachhead.

Tellingly, those Volkswagen workers who voted overwhelmingly to join the UAW back in 2024 had to wait nearly two years to secure a union contract. Thousands of Starbucks workers at approximately 700 stores have had to wait even longer. What began with a couple of dozen workers at a handful of Buffalo-area locations voting to unionize back in the winter of 2021 soon metastasized into a nationwide effort. But Starbucks has employed a tried-and-true tactic of delay. Workers at the successfully organized Buffalo Starbucks, for example, have now endured nearly five years of impasse as they await a union contract. Meanwhile, progress in organizing new stores has slowed. Delaying first-contract ratification saps a union of the energy and excitement that sustained the initial drive and slows any momentum the union hopes to use in new campaigns. It’s hard to convince ambivalent workers to join your cause if it takes years for them to enjoy the protections and material benefits unions provide, especially in high-turnover service-sector jobs.

One could go on: Chris Smalls’s successful organizing drive at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse in 2022 garnered him a New York magazine cover story and a White House invitation. It did not, however, garner a union contract: Those warehouse workers still remain at a bargaining impasse four years after the employee election to authorize unionization. During the period of “labor resurgence,” Trader Joe’s workers successfully unionized a few stores. But the “progressive” grocery retailer has fought contract ratification at the bargaining table while arguing in court that actions taken by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—the nearly century-old adjudicating body that governs labor-management relations in the private sector—are unconstitutional, joining other corporate giants like SpaceX and Amazon that have made similar claims.

What makes the ongoing attacks on the NLRB odd is that when it comes to efforts to fight off unionization drives, employers have long had the law on their side, and a massive anti-union consulting industry to alert them how best to deploy it. Well before fighting against a first contract, employers routinely subject suspected union sympathizers to surveillance, harassment, and outright termination. During a drive, employers force workers into “captive audience meetings” warning of the dangers of organizing, including that their jobs would be jeopardized should they vote the union in. Many of these practices are perfectly legal; some aren’t. But firms figure the penalties, such as rehiring a worker fired for pro-union activities and offering back pay, are paltry compared to the costs of dealing with a union.

Beyond employer intransigence and a legal framework tilted heavily in the bosses’ favor, core transnational challenges to private-sector organizing remain firmly in place. Generations back, automation and outsourcing eroded labor’s manufacturing stronghold in the United States and across other advanced economies. The continuing growth of service-sector industries presents labor with numerous organizing challenges. These range from how few workers are employed in many service-sector establishments, to high turnover rates that disrupt momentum during a drive, to the comparative lack of structural power wielded by, for example, workers at a Burger King versus engineers at a key Boeing plant. A strike at the former amounts to a small blip in the firm’s overall revenue as thousands of other outposts keep churning out Whoppers and fries. A strike at the latter immediately costs the company billions while threatening production and delivery schedules for clients like the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, widespread workplace “fissuring”—when companies fill jobs through subcontractors and staffing agencies, even for services performed internally, or shift legal responsibility for workers to others by franchising—forces organizers to chase moving targets, and numerous minor ones at that. A small subcontractor providing a few dozen front-desk workers to a name-brand hotel isn’t nearly as appealing or cost-effective a target as a giant steel factory welcoming thousands of employees daily to its gates. Fissuring is now ubiquitous, even among our tech giants. The majority of workers at Google, for example, aren’t actually employed by Google.

Public-Sector Breakthroughs—and Room for Growth

Another Southern union victory in the spring of 2024 generated far fewer headlines than the UAW’s triumph in Tennessee, and no encouragement from the then-President. It also brought in far more union members. In June, unions representing public-school workers in Fairfax County, Virginia, launched a massive organizing drive, and overnight the public-sector unionization ranks grew by more than 27,000—the equivalent of nearly seven auto plants.

The UAW’s breakthrough in Tennessee wasn’t even its largest recent win. Not by a long shot. A few years prior, the UAW gained 17,000 new members—but these workers weren’t busy churning out the latest SUV. Instead, they were graduate student researchers at California public universities, who formed the Student Researchers United affiliate of the UAW.

Despite their size, these labor advances went largely unheralded in the press, and largely unnoticed by pro-labor politicians and other allies. Yet they highlight a major difference in organizing potential in the public versus the private sector today: Public-sector unions can organize workers at scale. And these victories also reveal a fundamental fact of today’s public-sector union workforce: It has room to grow.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), passed in 1935, governs labor management relations throughout much of the private sector, and over time, private-sector employers have perfected ways to use the law to keep their workplaces union-free. There is no NLRA equivalent in the public sector. On the one hand, this means that anti-union states like South Carolina have great leeway to restrict collective bargaining rights among state and local workers. On the other, less hostile states can establish frameworks to make large-scale organizing efforts comparatively easy. That’s what happened with the Fairfax County educators, who took advantage of a statewide measure enacted in 2021 allowing Virginia counties to grant collective bargaining rights to state and local workers. No such measures are needed in more union-friendly states, which already confer widespread bargaining rights to government employees.

The sheer size of recent organizing breakthroughs in Virginia, California, and elsewhere is next to impossible to replicate in the private sector because of how bargaining units are defined differently. Organizing Starbucks requires painstaking and time-intensive organizing efforts—and separate votes—at each of the more than 15,000 outposts, since the NLRA considers bargaining units to be at the establishment level, rather than at the firm or sector level. By contrast, organizing graduate student researchers across dozens of California universities took only campaign because they all share a common employer: the state of California.

Encouragingly for unions looking to replicate these successes, millions of public-sector workers who aren’t in a union would join one if given the opportunity. A 2024 survey of 4,000 public-sector workers that I helped conduct found that approximately half of the nonunion workforce would sign up if they had the chance. Importantly, these millions of unorganized workers aren’t concentrated in states that restrict collective bargaining. If anything, nonunion government workers in pro-union states are slightly more receptive to unions than their counterparts in less friendly terrain. Even in the highest-union-density states, a huge swath of the public-sector workforce remains unorganized. Only one state in the United States—New York—has a public-sector unionization rate anywhere close to that of Canada.

Closing the gap between public-sector workers’ desire for representation and actual representation rates would bring the United States closer to peer countries when it comes to worker power. Canada’s overall union coverage rate is nearly three times that of the United States, with nearly a third of its total workforce covered by collective bargaining agreements. As in the United States, this overall rate masks enormous differences by sector. But the sectoral differences are even starker in Canada, with its public-sector coverage rate of nearly 80 percent compared to 15 percent in the private sector. Public-sector union membership in Great Britain isn’t as high as in Canada, but in 2025 it stood nearly 50 percent higher than in the United States.

Challenges to Organizing Government Workers

“Right to Work” Goes National

Recent scholarship reveals just how significant the passage of “right-to-work” (RTW) legislation has been for the private-sector workforce, union and nonunion alike. Inequality rises after these laws are enacted, while wages for middle- and working-class workers decline. The share of workers having to clock long hours climbs, and employers get stingier in pension provision.

Right-to-work laws ban unions from requiring workers in unionized establishments to join or pay the cost of representation, despite unions’ legal obligation to represent all workers. This encourages free-riding, as employees can enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining without bearing any costs. A slight majority of states have passed right-to-work legislation, but unions and their allies have stymied recent efforts to expand the map of RTW terrain, including in red states such as Missouri. The result today is a relatively frozen map after a period of pitched legislative battles in the 2000s and ’10s.

There’s been no such impasse in the public sector: A 2018 Supreme Court case, Janus v. AFSCME, effectively made the entire public sector RTW. Coverage at the time suggested the decision would “kneecap” unions that organize government workers, and that the consequences were likely to be permanent. Eight years after passage, the nation’s public-sector unionization rate has in fact declined—but only by about a percentage point. In 2017, the last full year prior to implementation of RTW throughout the public sector, just over 34 percent of public-sector workers were organized. In 2025, the last year for which we have complete data on union rolls, just under 33 percent remained union members.

Why Janus didn’t prove the death knell for government unions that so many labor supporters feared—and opponents wished for—remains an open question. Certain clues have emerged. First, an earlier and narrower Supreme Court case, Harris v. Quinn, foreshadowed Janus, with the majority opinion signaling the Court was likely to order RTW throughout the public sector in the near future. This tip-off provided unions with advance notice of where the Court was likely heading and time to plan a response. Many unions got to work shoring up existing memberships through aggressive outreach and advertising about the benefits they provide. And second, some states cushioned the blow by passing legislation that helped protect public-sector union finances, aided unions with recruitment by providing early access to new employees, and allowed unions to charge nonmembers for representing them in grievance procedures to discourage free-riding.

This resilience shows that the challenges posed by RTW can be overcome and shouldn’t be used as an excuse for inaction. After all, one way to limit the impact of free riders is to organize new dues-paying members.

The Federal Worker “Bloodbath”

As Janus showed, existing outside the strictures of the NLRA does not mean public-sector unions are invulnerable to attacks. Back in 2011, then-Governor Scott Walker signed legislation curtailing the power of public-sector workers in Wisconsin. Over the next decade, the state’s union rolls fell by half. And upon taking office in 2025, President Donald Trump took a hatchet to the federal workforce and to the unions that represent it, “accomplishing the largest individual episode of union busting in U.S. history,” according to labor historian Joseph McCartin. First, under the leadership of Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency initiative targeted hundreds of thousands of federal workers for removal. Later, Trump signed Executive Order 14251, which removed collective bargaining rights for a million of the federal workers who remained.

Yet, recent data indicate that the unionization rate among federal workers actually increased in 2025. The frontal assault may have motivated unorganized workers previously unconvinced that a union was necessary to sign up, blunting the effect of the Administration’s actions. It is too early to assess the long-term effects of Trump’s attack on the federal workforce. But what seems clear today is that Trump’s moves had the unanticipated (and from the Administration’s perspective, unwanted) effect of advertising the protections unions can provide to workers newly worried about their job security.

Protect the Private, Expand the Public

Over a decade back, longtime labor strategist and writer Richard Yeselson wrote in these pages of the need for the labor movement to practice “fortress unionism”: protect and solidify the few remaining union strongholds while waiting until a burst of working-class activism catalyzed new opportunities. As the economy reopened post-pandemic, that activism seemed to arrive; workers job-shopped for better deals in droves, driving up wages and demanding better working conditions. Strike activity surged, and organizing campaigns blossomed far beyond labor’s traditional bastions, including at topless bars and cannabis dispensaries.

It didn’t last, and labor’s gains proved fleeting. The private-sector density rate still sits at its historic low, and the need to buttress existing private-sector toeholds remains. At the same time, there are emerging signs of a political realignment that could eventually lead to passage of significant pro-labor legislation. The shifting class bases of the two parties have led a few renegade Republicans to support pro-union legislation, including a bill to speed up the time to a first contract, which recently passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. It has GOP support in the Senate as well, most notably from one of the bill’s sponsors, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. Will support attain a filibuster-proof majority, let alone override an almost certain veto from a President whose actions both before and upon assuming the presidency reveal nothing but antipathy to workers’ rights? No. But should the realignment continue, one can imagine a future Congress and administration less hostile to organized labor seeing such a bill to the finish line.

Yet fixing some of the most glaring deficiencies of the NLRA won’t rescue unions in the private sector, which remain on the defensive nearly everywhere, despite widely varying legal regimes and institutional environments. A major pro-union reform of the NLRA—one that goes much further than simply speeding up time to first contract—may help narrow the gap slightly between private-sector representation rates in the United States and, for example, Canada, where the legal barriers to organizing are lower. Yet Canada’s private-sector coverage rate has fallen by 27 percent just since the late 1990s. In Great Britain the drop has been even more precipitous, again despite a legal framework friendlier to union organizing efforts.

So while defending current strongholds and fighting desperately to codify recent union wins into actual contracts, labor should go on the offensive and help close the gap in public-sector union strength between the United States and its peer nations. This would require a massive organizing push throughout the public sector, along with significant funds to support it. An effort on such a scale needs buy-in from existing members, since it’s their dues that would provide the support for expansion. An educational campaign aimed at current members could focus on how growing the ranks strengthens members’ unions by increasing their power at the bargaining table. After all, a union representing just a fraction of the health-care workforce at a public hospital has less leverage than one representing all eligible workers. Sacrificing some portion of dues now could lead to better contracts in the future.

In fact, growing strength in the public sector redounds to many private-sector unions’ benefit too. Unions with blended memberships (in other words, unions that organize both public- and private-sector workers), like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), stand to gain by stepping up their public-sector organizing efforts, as an expanded public-sector base provides the seed capital to support their private-sector drives.

The class upheaval that would fundamentally transform private-sector labor relations hasn’t arrived, in the United States or elsewhere. Not yet. The need for many unions to batten down the hatches of their few private-sector fortresses remains as urgent today as in 2013, when Yeselson first proposed his plan. But that’s not all the U.S. labor movement should do. There’s a whole sector out there awaiting an organizing push, the success of which would render the American labor movement unexceptional relative to its peers. For a movement long known for its weakness, that would count as an exceptional win.