{"id":50062,"date":"2026-09-08T12:46:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T19:46:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=50062"},"modified":"2026-09-08T12:46:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T19:46:15","slug":"labor-day-2026-record-high-popularity-record-low-power-for-americas-unions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2026\/09\/08\/labor-day-2026-record-high-popularity-record-low-power-for-americas-unions\/","title":{"rendered":"Labor Day 2026: Record-High Popularity, Record-Low Power for America\u2019s Unions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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UNITE HERE Local 17 hospitality workers strike outside Target Field in Minneapolis, June 22, 2026.\u00a0Steven Garcia\/NurPhoto via AP.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

September 7, 2026 (Prospect.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Americans really like unions. Last week, Gallup released its\u00a0annual survey<\/a>\u00a0of the public\u2019s assessment of the labor movement, and found that unions\u2019 approval rating stood at 71 percent\u2014the highest it\u2019s been since 1957. While 89 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents approved of unions, even 52 percent of Republicans felt that way as well.
Moreover, fully 47 percent of our fellow Americans said they wanted unions to have more influence than they currently have, which is a record high for this century. Only 23 percent said they wanted unions to have less influence.
Gallup wasn\u2019t the only entity asking questions about unions\u2019 influence last week. On Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its own survey, which found that the share of the nation\u2019s economic output\u2014its work product\u2014going to wages and benefits was, at 52.8 percent, the lowest since the Bureau began measuring it in 1947. This followed another\u00a0government study<\/a>\u00a0in May that found that wages and benefits comprised the lowest share of the nation\u2019s income\u201451 percent\u2014since, again, the government started measuring such matters in 1947.
As the labor share has been declining, the capital share has been rising. The same May study showed that profits\u2019 share of the nation\u2019s income had risen to 12.1 percent, the highest level since 1950. The gap between wages and profits has ballooned over the past six years. Inflation-adjusted wages have increased by just 3 percent since late 2019, while profits have risen by 50 percent.
Pundits who wonder why the number of American socialists is growing should contemplate that last set of statistics.
There are any number of reasons why the share of America\u2019s economic output and Americans\u2019 income is at record lows for workers, but the evisceration of unions\u2014the only real vehicle through which workers can exert power\u2014over the past seven decades is the primary cause. In the early 1950s, more than a third of the nation\u2019s private-sector workers were unionized, and in many states outside the South, the unionized share stood at 40 percent or even higher. Unions\u2019 power\u2014strikes and the threat of strikes\u2014was such that companies with union contracts regularly raised wages and benefits in the quarter-century following World War II, and many companies with no union contracts were compelled to match the wages and benefits of the unionized companies in their industry, for fear of losing their workers to them.
As labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein\u00a0recently noted<\/a>\u00a0in our pages, the power of unions like the United Auto Workers \u201cforced managers of America\u2019s greatest industry, and all those who followed the patterns it set, to double the real wages of American industrial workers in little more than a generation. That was a singular accomplishment, never repeated in American history, before or since.\u201d
That, however, was then. Since that time, the erosion of workers\u2019 legal protections when they seek to form or join a union (an erosion propelled by employers, judges, and Republicans and not significantly countered by Democrats) has defeated countless organizing campaigns, while financialization, offshoring, and legislation that facilitated wealth concentration and capital\u2019s political influence have combined to decimate unions. Where once they represented one-third of the nation\u2019s private-sector workers, today they represent a mere 6 percent.
None of the tech giants or retail behemoths that dominate today\u2019s economy are unionized; the merest hint of workers seeking to organize prompts a level of management retaliation for which the word \u201cdisproportionate\u201d is laughingly inadequate. Baristas at 700 Starbucks vote to unionize; the company refuses to bargain with them. Employees at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022; the company has yet to begin bargaining with them\u2014and when its warehouse workers in one Quebec warehouse were able to unionize, thanks to Canada\u2019s more equitable labor laws, Amazon\u2019s response was to shutter not just that warehouse but all seven of its warehouses in Quebec.
Democrats have periodically sought to put some teeth back into the National Labor Relations Act, under whose current version management faces no meaningful punishment for violating its terms by illegally firing a worker involved in organizing. Going all the way back to the Johnson administration, Democrats seeking to restore workers\u2019 rights have never been able to surmount the Senate\u2019s 60-vote filibuster hurdle.
If they have trifecta control of the federal government after the 2028 elections, and move to scrap the filibuster so they can enlarge the Supreme Court, Democrats must also scrap it when it comes to reforming labor law. And merely passing their current version of that reform, the PRO Act, won\u2019t be enough to rebalance the relations between owners and workers. Unless they\u2019re resigned to perpetuating an economy in which a half-decade\u2019s rise of 3 percent in workers\u2019 wages requires a rise of 50 percent in profits, they must repeal the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. By so doing, they would not only end right-wing states\u2019 use of \u201cright to work\u201d statutes to block unionization, but they would also restore workers\u2019 freedom to boycott companies\u2014not those at which they themselves were employed\u2014whose workers are on strike.
It was through such measures that American worker power soared in the 1930s and \u201940s, and how labor stays strong in nations where secondary boycotts are still legal. (When McDonald\u2019s attempted to break the labor system in Denmark, it was\u00a0brought to its knees<\/a>\u00a0by boycotts that blocked the delivery of everything from menu paper to food.) If workers in this country are to regain the power they once had, and if America\u2019s current race to become the most economically unequal nation on the planet is not arrested and reversed, the Democrats are going to have to curtail much of capital\u2019s clout and, as the new Gallup poll shows record support for, increase labor\u2019s influence. (If repealing Taft-Hartley strikes some Democrats as extreme, they might remember that the bill was vetoed by that dangerous radical, Harry Truman, before it was overridden by Republicans and Southern Democrats.)
And if the Democrats are at all serious about regaining the long-term support of the working class, they\u2019re going to have to do what Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s Democrats did 90 years ago to win that support in the first place: empower America\u2019s workers. That would entail alienating most big-time investors and C-suite occupants who dominate our political economy, of course, but that\u2019s a necessary condition for American restoration.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UNITE HERE Local 17 hospitality workers strike outside Target Field in Minneapolis, June 22, 2026.\u00a0Steven Garcia\/NurPhoto via AP. September 7, 2026 (Prospect.org) Americans really like unions. Last week, Gallup released its\u00a0annual survey\u00a0of the public\u2019s assessment of the labor movement, and found that unions\u2019 approval rating stood at 71 percent\u2014the highest… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2467],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50062"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50062"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50064,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50062\/revisions\/50064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}