Labor union support has rebounded, Near record highs It fell slightly last summer after a number of high-profile strikes and work stoppages.
Polling firm Gallup's annual labor union survey released Wednesday showed that approval of labor unions rose to 70% in August 2024 from 67% last August.
In 2022, with inflation rising 9% annually, viewership soared to 71%, the highest level since 1965. Wages that summer rose just 5.4% on an annual basis, straining the finances of millions of Americans.
According to Gallup, labor unions have been growing in popularity in the U.S. for about 15 years, and support has accelerated during the pandemic.
Labor groups celebrated the surge in positive sentiment among Americans.
“Americans know that unions give workers the freedom to get ahead,” Lee Sanders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement Wednesday.
Inflation and union sentiment don't necessarily correlate: In the 1970s and early 1980s, union support declined even as inflation soared.
But this early inflation is widely believed to have been the result of a wage-price spiral in which rising prices led to rising wages, which in turn led to higher prices. At the time, much of the U.S. workforce was unionized, but union membership has declined since the late 1950s from a high of about 25%.
Global inflation since the pandemic was initially driven by shortages caused by economic shutdowns and then fueled by other factors such as expanding profit margins and increased consumer savings, but Americans are increasingly attributing it to corporate greed.
A February poll by left-leaning consultancy Global Strategy Group and GBAO found that since January 2022, the share of respondents who said “corporate greed” was the “main cause” of inflation had increased by 15 percentage points.
The political impact of inflation extends beyond labor unions, dragging down President Biden's economic approval ratings even as the economy booms during the pandemic recovery.
From 2021 to 2022, Biden's economic ratings fell to their lowest point on record, Gallup PollIt's set to fall to 35% by 2023 before rebounding slightly to 38% this year — only George W. Bush, who oversaw the start of the Great Recession, has ranked lower among recent presidents.
The decline in union support in 2023, bucking long-term trends, could be due to a number of strikes by high-profile groups such as the Hollywood SAG-AFTRA union and the Writers Guild of America.
The summer of 2023 has also been called the “summer of strikes” or the “summer of labor disputes,” with strikes at UPS, the United Auto Workers union, the Kaiser Permanente union, and the Los Angeles Unified School District Teamsters.
Labor Ministry data showed there were 33 new strikes involving more than 1,000 workers in 2023, up 43 percent from the previous year and the highest number in more than 20 years.
A broader tally compiled by Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations found that in 2023 there were 470 strikes involving 539,000 workers, totaling about 25 million strike days.
According to data from Cornell University, strikes were 9 percent higher that year than in 2022, and the number of workers who walked off the job due to labor disputes increased by 141 percent.
The only time in the post-war period that approval rating for labor unions was consistently higher than its current level was in the 1950s, when it fluctuated around 75%.
