More Workers Are Filing For — and Winning – Union Elections Than in Any Year in the Past Decade

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Workers are petitioning for more elections for union representation — and winning more of them – than any other year in a decade, with more than 75% of all private-sector organizing attempts from mid-2023 to mid-2024 resulting in union victories.

This year’s annual State of the Unions report from the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies spotlights the surge in successful union elections since the COVID-19 pandemic, a trend buoyed by young people and college-educated workers in a tight labor market.

Nationally, the growth in election petitions with the federal National Labor Relations Board reversed a decade of decline, according to the report, reaching “a level not seen since 2015,” and the current win rates “outpace any since 2005.”

In New York, new organizing was driven by academic and health care workers. In February, hundreds of full-time, non-tenure track faculty at New York University voted to join the United Auto Workers. Private-sector workers also waged successful election campaigns, from Barnes & Noble to bakeries and even a local pizzeria .

The continued increase in union petitions, successful elections and other activity by organized labor — like the large-scale strikes that rocked the automobile and film industries last year — shows that what was believed to be a pandemic-era trend has continued, said Ruth Milkman, a lead author of the report and chair of CUNY’s graduate labor studies department.

“Many people thought that the post-pandemic surge in interest in unions might be a short lived thing,” said Milkman. “It seems that, in fact, it’s continuing.”

Positive View

From January 2023 to June 2024, workers conducted 132 private-sector organizing attempts in the five boroughs, according to CUNY’s analysis. Of those, 69% resulted in successful union elections, and 11% resulted in voluntary recognition of the union by the employer. Nationally, 73% of elections were successful last year.

In a sign of strength, Contract Faculty United – UAW at NYU counted 67% turnout, with 625 workers voting at the university, according to the union. Regionally, the group boasts organizing 15,000 academic workers in the east coast area in the last five years.

One crucial driver of the growth in union organizing, according to the report, is the nation’s persistently tight labor market, and the leverage held by highly credentialed workers. That environment diminishes fear among union supporters, said Milkman, noting that nurses, doctors and academics are not easily replaced.

Even if those economic conditions don’t persist in the long-term, the generational shift in pro-union sentiment is likely to continue driving organizing, according to the report.

Several factors have contributed to union favorability among millennials and Gen Z , including the Great Recession, the lingering effects of the pandemic, the student loan debt crisis and the legacy of social movements like Occupy Wall Street.

But even as polls show public support for unions at a generational high, the surge in labor activity has not been enough to reverse the two-decade downward trend in union membership in New York and across the nation, Milkman noted.

Overall, the share of New York City residents who are in labor unions remained stable in the past year, at 61.1% in the public sector and 11.1% in the private sector — as the increase in organization is balanced by new non-union jobs being created every day.

The NYC Central Labor Council, the city’s federation of unions, disagrees with the CUNY report’s methodology and conclusions, claiming it does not account for people who work in the city but live in the suburbs.

“All of the problems that we’ve documented in the past remain,” said Milkman, including that federal labor law “is very lopsided in favor of employers.”

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