As surely as you can count on the sun rising tomorrow morning, you can be confident that Labor Day will be saturated with headlines extolling the virtues and accomplishments of organized labor while decrying persistent attacks intended to curtail its influence.
These virtues, of course, depend on whether one is a victim or beneficiary of the billions of dollars in dues plundered every year from workers’ paychecks and diverted into labor barons’ pockets.
Likewise, as fond as union apologists are of taking credit for inventing eight-hour workdays, 40-hour workweeks, paid vacations, and health coverage, history shows that entrepreneurs such as Henry Ford and Milton Hershey recognized in the early days of the industrial revolution that higher wages and better benefits attract the most skilled, productive workers. Their competitors soon realized the need to follow suit — a result of free market capitalism rather than any of Big Labor’s self-aggrandizing myths.
Fortunately for everyone else, however, Big Labor’s claims that unions are declining are true.
Since the mid-1950s, when union participation peaked at around a third of the U.S. workforce, union membership has plummeted. Today, just 10% of U.S. workers are in a union, but that only tells part of the story.
In the private sector, where 100% of the country’s value is produced, only a minuscule 5.9% of workers are union members. The only factor keeping overall union membership at 10% is the fact that, in 2024, just over 32% of those employed in some capacity by government agencies were union members.
And even those numbers are deceiving.
Shortly after public employees were first allowed to unionize in the early 1960s, many blue states began making union membership and dues a requirement for government jobs. The Supreme Court’s 1977 ruling in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education finally recognized the right of public sector workers to decline membership and dues, but it also stipulated they could be forced to pay the union a so-called “agency fee” instead.
On paper, that changed in 2018, when another Supreme Court ruling, Janus v. AFSCME, affirmed that these agency fees constituted an infringement of workers’ First Amendment rights. But union bosses soon hatched yet another array of schemes to negate the court’s ruling, inciting numerous courtroom clashes between unions and their own members since then.
While the court has not yet expressed interest in considering a Janus-related appeal, hundreds of thousands of government employees have escaped the legal labyrinth of labor tyranny, opting out of their unions completely. The question remaining: How many more would have done so if unions had simply agreed, or been compelled, to follow the law from the outset?
LABOR DAY 2025: WHAT TO KNOW AHEAD OF TRAVELING THIS WEEKEND
Established as a federal holiday in June 1894, Labor Day was suggested by labor leaders to “pay tribute to the contributions and achievements of American workers.” And rightfully so.
Despite the delusions of big union fat cats who demand the public flatter them with undeserved acclaim, this country was not built by them, but by the workers for whom Labor Day was originally intended. Let us remember this amid the blusterous holiday headlines trying to convince us otherwise.
Aaron Withe is the CEO of the Freedom Foundation.