Nothing in American life illustrates the vast chasm between "what I say" and "what I do" better than abstract approval of labor unions versus actual willingness to join one.  

Respondents continue to express positivity toward unions in polls, but private-sector union membership remains at a record low of 5.9%.  People remain conceptually fine with unions, as long as they don't have to actually belong to one.  

In other words, Americans regard labor unions the same way that they regard kale and public television:  admirable in the abstract, but considerably less appealing when it requires personal participation.  

Much of that conceptual positivity stems from organized labor’s self-congratulatory mythology about creating America’s middle class, the 40-hour workweek, rising wages and workplace benefits.  Perhaps no myth enjoys greater immunity from inconvenient historical reality than the claim that labor unions somehow gifted Americans the 40-hour workweek.  

Facts and chronology tell a very different story.  

Ford Motor Company, for example, adopted the five-day, 40-hour workweek for factory employees in 1926 under Henry Ford – hardly a union sympathizer.  Ford had also already introduced his famous $5 workday in 1914, simultaneously reducing the standard workday from nine hours to eight.  

Ford didn’t sign its first contract with the United Auto Workers (UAW), however, until 1941 – fifteen years after introducing the 40-hour week.  

Accordingly, the stubborn claim that unions somehow created the modern workweek is impossible to reconcile with simple chronology.  

Beyond chronology, however, another inconvenient historical fact punctures the labor movement myth.  Namely, even at organized labor’s mid-century zenith, the lopsided majority of American workers didn’t belong to unions.  

Specifically, union membership temporarily peaked at just 33% of American workers in 1954, triggering the obvious question:  If unions bestowed all of those benefits upon American workers, who bestowed them upon the two-thirds who never belonged to one?  

The simple answer is that the open marketplace did.  

After all, employers must compete for workers just as workers compete for jobs.  As productivity increases and businesses compete for capable employees, compensation and working conditions improve.  Paid vacations, for example, were already proliferating throughout American workplaces decades ago, including among salaried employees whose vacation plans commonly originated during the 1920s.  

Fast-forward to today, and workers themselves continue to render a devastating verdict on organized labor.  

As noted above, just 5.9% of private-sector workers belonged to unions in 2025, down from 20.1% as recently as 1983.  

Just as damningly, cozy government employment offers organized labor’s last refuge.  

Namely, public-sector union membership now stands at 32.9% – over five times the private-sector rate.  Offering further perspective, despite a vastly larger private economy, America counted approximately the same number of union members in government – 7.3 million – as in the entire private sector, at 7.4 million.  

That signals something important.  

Namely, wherever workers and employers interact most directly in competitive markets, unions have become increasingly toxic.  Where government dominates employment and political influence can substitute for marketplace discipline, in contrast, labor unions remain comparatively entrenched.  

In the private sector, when labor costs exceed the value workers produce, the consequences manifest themselves somewhere – through fewer jobs, higher prices, greater automation, reduced investment or businesses relocating elsewhere.  

None of that means workers shouldn’t remain free to organize voluntarily and bargain collectively, of course.  The First Amendment itself safeguards the right of association, and that should include workers who freely choose to organize if they wish.  

By the same token, however, that right comes with the risk that unionization will price jobs out of existence.  Additionally, the freedom of association necessarily includes freedom not to associate, and workers shouldn’t be forced to have their wages diverted to labor bosses and political activity if they choose an alternative path.  

Today, by a 19-to-1 margin, the overwhelming number of American workers exercise precisely that freedom.  

That makes organized labor’s continuing decline particularly revealing.  In the real world, unions kill more jobs than they safeguard or enhance.  

Unions continue to enjoy enormous political influence, favorable labor laws and decades of cultural mythology portraying them as indispensable architects of American prosperity.  Yet when actual workers vote with their paychecks and membership choices, barely one in twenty private-sector employees chooses union membership.  

American workers apparently understand something union mythology cannot concede:  Prosperity doesn’t originate at organized labor bosses’ bargaining table.  

Rather, it originates from productivity, innovation, competition and economic freedom.  Unlike union membership, those never go out of fashion.