Two years ago, Vice President Kamala Harris promised to help “lead the most pro-union administration in America’s history.” Since then, union membership among employed Americans has fallen to record lows — an indicator of labor unions’ declining bargaining power.
“President Joe Biden and I are determined to lead the most pro-union administration in America’s history,” Harris told members of the Sheet Metal Workers Union in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in April 2022. “… [U]nions change lives. Unions negotiate better wages and safer working conditions for millions of workers around our country.”
On Harris’s watch, though, labor unions — representing public and private sector employees — have seen their bargaining power reduced to the smallest percentage of the American workforce in history.
In 1955, more than one in three American workers were represented by a union. By 2023, only one in ten American workers belonged to a union. Even lower, only six percent of Americans in the private sector are represented by a union.
This record low in union membership comes even as seven in ten Americans say they support unions. Some of that support can be traced to a resurgence of populism within the Republican Party, bringing the GOP back to its roots as the representative of working and middle class Americans.
While Biden and Harris have made promises to union workers, Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) are running on the same populist agenda that brought Republican voters into the fold regarding support for unions.
Vance, for instance, made a direct pitch to union workers at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July, saying:
We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike. A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American companies and American industry. A leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Green New Scam and fights to bring back our great American factories. [Emphasis added]
Trump went as far as to invite Teamsters President Sean M. O’Brien to speak at the RNC, the first time a Teamsters president has ever spoken at a Republican convention.
“President Trump had the backbone to open the doors to this Republican convention, and that’s unprecedented,” O’Brien said. “No other nominee in the race would’ve invited the Teamsters into this arena.”
Among Trump and Vance’s chief principles to benefit American workers, including those who belong to unions, is reducing the inflow of cheaper foreign labor for hire.
The end goal, Trump and Vance have said, is sky-high wages and a labor market where Americans do not have to compete against an ever growing pool of foreign workers who will take jobs for much less pay.
“President Trump believes very strongly that the best way to promote raising Americans’ wages is with tight labor markets,” Vance told a crowd in Philadelphia in August:
When an employer has got to pay a good wage to attract the right people … whether you have a higher minimum wage or a lower minimum wage, the way to destroy the wages of American workers is to import 20 million illegal aliens and let them stay here with work visas. [Emphasis added]
Conversely, Harris is running on a policy initiative that would have migrants arriving at the United States-Mexico border released into the nation’s interior with work permits so they can immediately begin taking working and blue-collar jobs.
Likewise, Harris has outlined her plans to give amnesty to most of the 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living across the United States — a move that would legalize millions of illegal aliens and allow them to begin legally holding jobs in the American workforce.
Labor market research has historically shown that mass immigration undercuts the bargaining power of unions.
“The revival of the phenomenon of mass immigration is, of course, not the only explanation for the decline in union membership … but mass immigration is one of the key factors especially because of the large component of the total flow are illegal immigrants,” The late Vernon Briggs Jr., a labor economist at Cornell University, testified to Congress in 2007.
As of 2022, more than 30 million legal immigrants and illegal aliens were holding American jobs — a 20-percent increase over the last 15 years. In comparison, over that same period, the number of native-born Americans who have been added to the United States workforce has increased by less than 10 percent.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
