When the Ref Is Paid by Management, Workers Cannot Win

June 7, 2026

In 2025, the share of American workers belonging to a union hit 10.0 percent, exactly half the rate recorded in 1983. The number feels like a verdict. It is not. It is a map of where decades of deliberate legal, legislative, and financial pressure have landed, and the same map shows exactly where that pressure is being applied right now, in real time, under the current administration.

The Money on the Other Side of the Table

A May 2026 report from the Economic Policy Institute and LaborLab put a dollar figure on what "union avoidance" costs American employers: more than $1.5 billion a year. That money goes to law firms, consultants, and anti-union campaign specialists whose only job is to make sure workers who want to vote yes end up voting no, or never get to vote at all. For context, that is roughly three times what the National Labor Relations Board receives in federal funding.

The math is not subtle. The body that runs union elections is outspent 3-to-1 by the industry dedicated to preventing those elections from producing the wrong result. When the ref is paid by management, the game is not fair.

Gutting the Agency That Holds the Whistle

The National Labor Relations Board is the federal agency that runs union elections, investigates unfair labor practices, and enforces the basic rules of collective bargaining. The Trump administration's 2026 budget proposal would cut NLRB funding by roughly 25 percent, according to a report from Northwest Labor Press. This follows the administration's removal of the NLRB general counsel and two board members — moves that left the agency without a quorum to issue decisions for months.

Without a functioning NLRB, complaints about illegal firings of union organizers stall. Elections get delayed. Employers who violate labor law face no enforcement. The 1.5 billion dollars spent on union avoidance becomes an even better investment when the agency that could penalize that spending is understaffed and leaderless.

The PRO Act (H.R. 20, introduced in the 119th Congress) would close many of the loopholes employers exploit during organizing drives, including banning mandatory "captive audience" meetings and stiffening penalties for retaliation. It has passed the House before. It is not on the current agenda.

What a Union Actually Buys

In 2025, full-time workers represented by a union had median weekly earnings of $1,404, compared to $1,174 for non-union workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is a 20 percent premium. Union workers are also far more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and pension benefits.

The benefits are not evenly distributed by accident. They are most pronounced for Black workers, Hispanic workers, and workers without a college degree — the groups with the least individual bargaining leverage and the most to gain from collective power. EPI research shows that the decline of union membership since 1980 accounts for a substantial share of the growth in wage inequality over the same period.

"The erosion of collective bargaining has widened the gap between productivity and pay" — Economic Policy Institute

Workers Are Winning. The Rulebook Keeps Shrinking.

Here is the part of this story that does not fit the "unions are dying" narrative: NLRB election statistics show that when workers actually get to a vote, union win rates have been above 65 percent in recent years. Workers want unions. The obstacle is not worker appetite. The obstacle is the machinery built to prevent them from getting there.

Starbucks, Amazon, nurses at dozens of hospitals, graduate students at major universities — the organizing wave of the past three years has been real. So has the counter-pressure: illegal firings, store closures, years-long contract delays, and now a federal enforcement agency being deliberately weakened from the top.

The 10 percent figure is not a reflection of what workers want. It is a reflection of what $1.5 billion a year and a defunded NLRB can produce. The question is whether the current administration will be the one to finish the job.

Sources

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