The past 18 months have been marked by loud labor organizing efforts — and opposition — at several massive corporate enterprises, including Starbucks and Amazon. Public approval of unions, meanwhile, is up to 71%, the highest level since 1965, according to a Gallup poll from August 2022. Yet according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the union membership rate of 10.1% last year was the lowest since records were kept, dating to 1983.
There’s certainly no single reason for those seemingly contradictory sets of statistics. But there is a main culprit: the country’s wildly outdated labor laws.
