The data released on Wednesday by the National Labor Relations Board reveals that unions are filing petitions to hold elections and winning them at rates not seen in decades, probably due to the agency’s adoption of policies favored by unions under the Biden administration.
In a release, the board said it had already received more than 2,600 union election petitions for this fiscal year ending September 30th, surpassing last year’s total. This means that up until now NLRB regional offices have seen a 32% increase in the number of filed petitions as compared to this time last year.
In most cases, bargaining units require unions to demand and then win elections via NLRB supervision to represent such groups of workers.
And labor organizations are capturing more votes –the NLBR indicates that they won in approximately 79% of such cases this year when they petitioned for an election, which is higher than the previous result equal to about 76%. However, as few as sixty and two-thirds per cent of contests occurring every twelve months used to be won consistently by trade unions until a couple of years ago.
No reason was given by the board for their sudden surge into action since it usually releases annual data later in the same year.
Nevertheless, despite an upsurge in union elections recently there has been little improvement in terms of American workers represented by unions whereby these levels remain close to all-time lows. Only around eleven percent of all American workers and six percent of employees within private sectors work with trade unions unlike more than thirty percent during forties through fifties.
This countrywide spike in union organizing is widely believed among many experts as being linked directly to concerns over working conditions stemming from Covid-19 pandemic while others claim it represents a counter reaction against efforts made during Donald Trump’s Republican administration to reduce their power base.
During Biden presidency, Obama-era faster election policies have been revived by the board which is normally perceived as pro-union, at the same time it has opened up a new way for union to organize employees and extended federal labor law protection to more workers’ behavioral patterns.
The agency is governed by a board comprising of its general counsel and five members appointed by the president. Its operation is independent from executive branch although the names of three of its members are generally drawn from that of the incumbent while two others are picked from opposing side. Their five-year tenures are distributed over time such that there can be no overlapping between them.
Public support for unions is now higher than it ever was in the 1960s, according to Catherine Fisk, who teaches at Berkeley School of Law at UC. In her words, having just outlined actions taken recently by NLRB to boost union organization on top of those positive attitudes towards labour unions themselves encourage workers to create them as thousands of Starbucks employees have done since 2021 or through affiliating with existing ones like United Auto Workers whom they overwhelmingly voted in Tennessee’s Volkswagen plant not long ago.
“Unions are becoming more popular;” she added.
Given that in recent years the NLRB has been acting more like an advocate for unions rather than being an impartial mediator in job disputes, Glenn Spencer (whose title is Senior Vice President for Employment Policy at U.S Chamber of Commerce which is America’s largest business agitator) said he was unsurprised with these results. Specifically, he stated in one email,” As a matter of fact every member in this administration including Biden himself has pushed unionization regardless of how much damage it causes our economy and worker rights”.
Among the most recent board’s decisions that has elicited heated criticism from business organizations was a 2023 ruling involving Cemex, a construction materials company, where it allowed NLRB to compel employers who violate labor laws during organizing drives to negotiate with unions even in cases where workers vote against unionizing.
The Cemex ruling also stipulates that employers shown proof of majority support for union representation by signed authorization cards must either acknowledge the union or call an election. The board said that since that decision, more employers have petitioned it rather than unions-leaving them handling over twenty times as many such applications this year compared to before.
