ANALYSIS: Unions’ Organizing Hot Streak Shows Signs of Cooldown

Union organizing activity is showing signs of slowing down from its currently elevated pace, based on Bloomberg Law’s midyear calculations of election records reported by the National Labor Relations Board.

Unions participated in—and won—fewer representation elections in the first half of 2025 than in the first halves of any of the previous three years.

In the first six months of 2025, the NLRB resolved 771 elections. In 624 of those elections, the majority of voters chose to be represented by a union, according to Bloomberg Law’s midyear report on NLRB election statistics.

When set against the backdrop of a decades-long decline in union organizing, these figures denote a relatively successful half-year stretch for labor. But they amount to a sizable drop-off in the current fast-paced era of labor relations, in which organizers have cleared new inroads into workforces that were beset by furloughs, budget cuts, and health and safety risks in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and economic shutdown.

Unions notched 653 wins in NLRB elections in first-half 2022, 662 wins in H1 2023, and a 25-year high of 842 wins in H1 2024 before reverting to 624 wins this year.

The impact of the 2025 drop-off is amplified by an even steeper decline in the number of workers gaining union representation as a result of these elections.

In the first half of this year, unions organized 37,512 workers. That’s higher than the H1 totals for 2016–2021, but it falls short of H1 2022 (43,502 workers), H1 2023 (58,483), and H1 2024 (64,005).

A silver lining for labor in 2025 is that unions’ midyear winning percentage is higher than ever, at 81%. But that’s no surprise. Unions have been upping their win rate for decades, even as they have initiated fewer overall elections and organized fewer total workers—effectively winning a growing slice of a steadily shrinking pie.

In their current hot streak, union organizers’ knack for choosing winning battles has been augmented by large increases in the number of targeted workplaces. But if those totals continue to fall off in the second half of the year, a high win rate won’t give organizers the numbers they need to maintain their momentum.

The midyear 2025 NLRB Union Elections report is available to Bloomberg Law subscribers on the Labor Relations & Collective Bargaining page.

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