Is this the worst moment for the labor movement in recent memory, or the best? That question animated a conversion I recently had with Mary Kay Henry, who just stepped down as the president of the 2-million-member Service Employees International Union, having been an organizer for 43 years and led the SEIU for 14.
Positive sentiment toward unions has surged over the past decade. Interest in joining a union has surged. Petitions to form a union have surged. And a number of high-profile organizing drives have succeeded: among Uber and Lyft drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, Starbucks baristas, and Volkswagen manufacturing employees, in the staunchly anti-union South, no less. For its part, the SEIU has organized thousands of hospital employees, home health aides, and child-care workers in recent years.
And yet, just 11 percent of American workers were represented by a union as of 2023—a number that has been falling. Less than 7 percent of private-sector workers have union representation, down from 17 percent in 1983. During Henry’s time leading the SEIU, membership was flat at roughly 2 million. Unions are financed by their members, and are at their most influential when negotiating on behalf of those members. Is it possible to have a stronger American labor movement without having a bigger one?
Henry thinks it is, and her innovation was to extend the SEIU’s influence without expanding its ranks. A longtime strike leader, she took over as the president of the SEIU in 2010, a bleak year for organized labor and American workers in general. The Great Recession had ravaged the labor market. The union-approval rate had plunged to an all-time low of 48 percent. Republican politicians had capitalized on the trend to expand and strengthen right-to-work rules that prevented unions from collecting dues from nonmembers, sapping their ability to organize.
In 2012, an SEIU local helped organize a strike among employees of fast-food restaurants in New York City: Dozens of cashiers, janitors, and cooks for Burger King, KFC, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s picketed instead of working their shifts, asking for $15 an hour and a union. Soon, thousands of workers across the country were picketing and walking off the job. The SEIU was instrumental in what became known as the Fight for $15 and a Union, providing organizing capacity, media relations, and millions of dollars in support.
The campaign seemed like a long shot. The federal minimum wage was just $7.25 at the time. Then-President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats were pushing for $9 an hour. Henry recalled Tom Harkin, then a Democratic senator representing Iowa, who had proposed $10.10 an hour, asking her, “What are you doing? This is ridiculous.”
Moreover, the SEIU was spending money supporting the protests of workers who were not paying SEIU dues and had little prospect of becoming SEIU members. “There were questions inside our leadership about whether we should continue to back it,” Henry told me, noting that most members of leadership thought the answer was no. “I just had an instinct, based on listening to the workers themselves, that we needed to continue, because we had to find a way to disrupt the decades-long attack on the labor movement that was unfolding.”
The “tide shifted,” Henry told me, when the Fight for $15 began galvanizing workers outside the fast-food industry. Workers at airports, colleges and universities, and hospitals decided to push for union representation. It really shifted when the Fight for $15 started notching tangible policy victories. SeaTac, Washington, voted to bump its minimum wage to $15 an hour in late 2013, followed by Seattle, dozens of cities and counties, several states, and a number of major employers. The Obama administration set a $10.10 an hour wage floor for federal contractors early in 2014. The National Employment Law Project estimates that the Fight for $15 helped generate $150 billion in wage increases for 26 million workers. “It became a movement far bigger than our institution,” Henry told me.
“Mary Kay Henry helped revitalize the labor movement,” Obama told me in an email. “She matched a fierce intelligence and dedication to social justice with deep empathy and a sharp sense of humor, and America is stronger today thanks to her efforts. I could not have asked for a better, more creative partner.”
The Fight for $15 was not the only way the SEIU supported workers outside its ranks. In 2017, an SEIU local in Seattle—along with the nonprofits Casa Latina, Working Washington, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance—began pushing for the city to strengthen protections for nannies, housekeepers, and health aides. The city did so by passing a domestic workers’ bill of rights and setting up a standards board, composed of labor advocates, employers, and workers. Domestic workers started to get a say in minimum wages, overtime rules, and insurance policies. And they got the aid of SEIU, even though they do not have the right to unionize in the United States.
Sectoral bargaining—in which unions negotiate with many employers or even an entire industry at a time, as is common in Europe—is also barred in the United States. But standards boards like the one in Seattle, also called workers’ boards or industry councils, are legal. And more have cropped up: for farm laborers in New York, domestic workers in Philadelphia, nursing-home workers in Michigan, agricultural workers in Colorado, home-care workers in Nevada, arena workers in Detroit, and fast-food workers in California.
The SEIU is involved with many, allowing the union to “collectivize power” across unions and represent workers outside its ranks, Henry explained. For a union leader, she added, it is “kind of scary.” Unions might end up accepting concessions together that they never would have agreed to individually. They might have to reorganize internally. They might have to figure out how and what to negotiate with policy makers, not just employers. But it is also thrilling, she argued, because the organizations are capable of aiding hundreds of thousands more workers than they would normally be able to. (The California fast-food council alone is writing rules for more than 550,000 workers, only a tiny sliver of whom are union members.)
She hopes that trend continues beyond her tenure. “How do we move from an incremental-growth strategy to the kind of industrial-growth strategy that the CIO had in the 1930s?” she asked me, referring to the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a New Deal–era union federation. “We need to imagine workers that aren’t currently covered by labor law—home-care workers, child-care workers, farmworkers, everybody that was written out, and all these new jobs that have been created that nobody even imagined existing.” She added: “One of my dreams has been to have four or five unions pool resources and think about the 5 million workers in the gig sector. Instead of trying to carve them up, how do we back all of them in making demands of Uber, Lyft, and Doordash?”
Of course, that kind of creative bargaining is necessary only because traditional organizing remains so difficult in the United States. The country’s geography poses a challenge, since many workers are “dispersed” and there are not “natural congregation points,” Suresh Naidu of Columbia University told me. More importantly, more than two dozen states have right-to-work laws. Companies commonly engage in illegal anti-union tactics with impunity: closing stores in which employees are organizing, firing organizers, interfering with employees who are organizing off-hours, and delaying negotiations with pro-union workers. “Labor law in the U.S. is broken,” Henry told me. “That’s why we’ve been so dedicated to trying to find solutions where workers can organize across sectors and geographies.”
Yet doing that kind of work might be difficult if unions cannot expand their traditional ranks. Unions collect dues to pay for organizing: A union that is not growing, or in which more members are opting out of paying dues, is a union losing its traditional form of firepower. (Federal reporting forms show that the SEIU headquarters’ budget swelled and then declined during Henry’s tenure, with the Washington office collecting about $250 million a year from local unions, down from $270 million when she started.) With funds tight, members might want their union to focus on organizing and bargaining and stop advocating on behalf of unrepresented workers or spending millions on elections, as the SEIU now does. (When unions are required by law to ask members if they want their dues spent on campaigns, their political spending drops.)
Plus, when workers see wages rising everywhere, they may not feel compelled to give up part of their paycheck to a labor organization. Michael Strain, the director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-of-center think tank, performed research showing that minimum-wage increases lead to reduced union membership. Unions, he told me, are in a “precarious” position if “public policy is substituting for what a union can deliver.” That said, he added, “there’s a real benefit to unions in engaging in these sorts of campaigns, because they are—I would say correctly—being perceived by a broader swath of the workforce as fighting for them.”
Other countries have shown that small unions can still have a big impact. In France, a slim share of private-sector employees are union members, but nearly all workers are covered by a collective-bargaining agreement, Naidu noted. “It means something different to be a union member in France,” he told me. “You’re much more likely to be a union activist or closer to a steward,” advocating for a broad group of workers.
Henry told me she believed that union density might begin to tick up in the United States. She pointed to the Volkswagen workers in Tennessee, who voted to form a union on their third try. She pointed to the National Labor Relations Board, whose general counsel is “for the first time in my 40 years actually trying to enforce the National Labor Relations Act on behalf of workers.” She pointed to the extraordinary enthusiasm young people have for organized labor.
But if the situation doesn’t change, the unions will have to.