July 25, 2022 10:36AM # Will Young, Well-Educated Workers Lead a Union Revival? By [Walter Olson](https://www.cato.org/people/walter-olson) --- SHARE “After decades of declining union membership, organized labor may be on the verge of a resurgence in the U.S.” [claimed](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/17/briefing/union-drives-college-graduates.html) the *New York Times* last week, echoing dozens of similar claims lately. But how solid is the case for such a union comeback, and if it happens is it likely to be broad or narrow? *The Economist* invited me to write a guest column on the topic, which was [published last week](https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/07/18/unions-are-now-a-lifestyle-choice-for-some-workers-says-walter-olson). I begin with figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which found the share of American workers belonging to unions fell last year, not rose, from 10.8% to 10.3%, back to its 2019 share and far below 1983’s 20.1% or the all time peak of 34.8% in 1954. Overall, union membership in the United States fell last year by 241,000 to 14 million. How can this be so when we keep reading stories about organizing drives at high-profile workplaces? Unions have lately signed up workers at media outlets like *Vox*, *BuzzFeed*, *New York* magazine and the *New Yorker*, as well as at well-known advocacy and arts nonprofits. What’s going on here, I argue, may owe more to culture than to questions of pay and promotion. Sectors hit lately with union ferment tend to have youthful, well-educated and aspirational workforces. “Many of these jobs attract a generation whose members often have strong opinions on social issues, and perhaps see the workplace as more than just the vehicle for a paycheck.” After years of looking for a breakthrough in fast-food organizing, unions found it not at, say, Kentucky Fried Chicken but at Starbucks. Relatedly, the *New York Times* in its [interview](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/17/briefing/union-drives-college-graduates.html) with labor reporter Noam Scheiber notes that “college-educated workers have been heavily involved” in recent organizing drives, often “people with radical politics taking jobs with the explicit intention of organizing workers.” Scheiber’s example is a Rhodes Scholar who “wore a Karl Marx sweatshirt at Oxford”; back stateside she proceeded to take a job as a barista at a Buffalo Starbucks, successfully organizing fellow workers there and then reaching out to other outlets of the same chain. (The campus-radical-to-union-star pipeline, to be sure, is [hardly](https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2010/0910early.html) [new](https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/Wilhelm-once-a-campus-star-now-a-constant-thorn-11688494.php).) The column, which is paywalled, tackles many other angles of the subject, from public opinion to the role of government worker unions. The takeaway: unions are getting a boost of sorts from being seen as vehicles for social justice, but a campaigning view of social justice is not a majority taste, even among the young and mobile. “There’s a reason organizers report more success among staff at national environmental organizations than among, say, drywall installers, a sector employing 140,000.” ##### Related Tags [Economics](https://www.cato.org/economics), [Politics and Society](https://www.cato.org/politics-society) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).