Union election petitions spiked this year, the federal government reported Monday.
The National Labor Relations Board said it received 3,286 union election petitions in fiscal year 2024, up 27% over the previous year.
The surge builds on a multi-year climb since President Joe Biden took office. The FY 2024 number is more than double that of FY 2021, the year he was inaugurated.
Biden in a Tuesday statement said the numbers show he kept his promise to be the most union-friendly president in history.
Union election petitions spike
The election petition surge happened during a year when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the rate of union membership had hit an all-time low: Just 10% of the U.S. workforce were union members in 2023, it said; in 1983, the union membership rate was 20.1%.
NLRB on Monday also reported an increase, albeit much smaller, in unfair labor practice charge filings. It received more than 21,000 in FY 2024, a 7% increase over the previous year.
Unfair labor practice charges continue to climb
NLRB attributed the case surges to workers understanding and exercising their rights, and to the Board’s engagement with them.
The agency, however, is facing a backlog in processing those cases — a problem it pinned on flat funding from Congress for this year. “Additional resources are necessary to enable the Board to expand staffing capacity and ensure that the workers, employers, and unions that rely on our agency benefit from timely resolution of their labor disputes,” said Chairman Lauren McFerran in a statement.
