It hardly qualifies as news anymore, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership declined from 2023 to 2024, going from 10% to 9.9% of wage and salary workers. Some 32% of public employees are union members compared to only 5.9% of private-sector workers, down from 6% in 2023.

This means 49% of all union members work for the government and, even more striking, 32% belong to the two national teachers unions. As National Review’s Dominic Pino pointed out, national media is chock full of hopeful stories about union organizing drives and strikes — he cited 214 in 2024 — but the longtime trend line away from private-sector unions has not turned around despite the considerable efforts of Democratic politicians.

This is despite a certain amount of nostalgia in liberal and conservative quarters for the days when union representation of private-sector employees was considered the norm. Union membership as a percentage of employees peaked at 33.5% in 1954, when almost no public employees belonged to unions.

That’s more than five times the percentage of private-sector union membership today. It’s even more striking because few union members lived in the South, so the union share in the North was up to 40%.

What accounts for this major change in American life? It starts with how unions were formed. Craft and building unions have roots going back more than a century, when many served the function of medieval guilds — maintaining quality standards and stamping out the competition. They often had a discernible ethnic character, with membership open to sons, brothers, nephews and cousins of current members.

The big jump — a tripling — in union membership came suddenly from 1937 to 1947 after the passage of the New Deal’s Wagner Act. Industrial workers weren’t the worst-off employees in the 1930s Depression. They feared that “time and motion study” managers would speed up the assembly lines, and, with 20% unemployment, they knew they could be easily replaced if they walked out.

In early 1937, auto and steel union organizers staged illegal sit-ins in the giant factories that fueled American economic growth from the 1890s to the 1920s. After Democratic governors refused to enforce court orders to clear out, auto and steel executives caved in and accepted the industrial unions as bargaining agents.

When the big factories switched to wartime production, industrial labor leaders, such as the young Walter Reuther, cooperated to prevent strikes as workers churned out astonishing numbers of planes in Henry Ford’s Willow Run plant in Michigan and boats in Henry J. Kaiser’s Richmond shipyards in California.