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Government unions looked like they were up against the ropes in 2018. Then, a landmark Supreme Court decision, Janus v. AFSCME, cut them off from a major revenue source. Janus ruled that unions could no longer force public employees to pay "fair share" fees to unions they never joined.
In the years that followed, the four largest government unions -- the National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) -- lost hundreds of thousands of members. Most people assumed this decline would keep going.
But new numbers suggest otherwise. Taken together, those same four unions have added back more than 230,000 members since 2024, the Commonwealth Foundation reports. That's a 3.5 percent jump, and it has wiped out most of what looked like a permanent decline. Two of the four unions, AFSCME and SEIU, now have more members than they did before Janus. Only one union, the NEA, is still losing members, but even that decline has slowed.
This didn't happen by accident. Union leaders changed their strategy.
Instead of fighting to keep the fees that courts had struck down, they started pushing state lawmakers for new kinds of legislative cover. Since 2022, government unions have lobbied for a smorgasbord of new permissive laws, such as ones requiring employers to hand over workers' private information -- home addresses, phone numbers, etc. With access to such information, the unions recruited aggressively.
But these union-friendly "reforms" didn't stop there. New laws also granted unions access to government email and payroll systems, as well as buildings and facilities, for their recruitment efforts.
Also, in a growing number of states, government unions can now legally organize a workplace just by collecting signed cards from employees. These "card checks" allow unions to skip secret-ballot votes altogether and reward organizers for pressuring -- and sometimes harassing -- workers outside of the workplace.
Government unions have also expanded their reach to careers previously seen as inappropriate for unionization, such as graduate school assistants, non-tenure-track professors, and home- and day-care workers. Some even lobbied to unionize foster parents and state prisoners.
State by state, government unions have succeeded at codifying these tactics. Since 2024, state lawmakers have introduced 495 bills that legalized new pro-union activities -- 87 of which became law. Now, 24 states require employers to give workers' personal contact information to union organizers. Twenty-eight states let arbitrators make binding decisions that can override the planned budgets of elected officials. Only twelve states guarantee workers a secret-ballot vote before a union can represent them.
Government unions have also succeeded in defeating new laws that would rein in their powers.
Case in point: Utah. In February 2025, Governor Spencer Cox signed a law banning collective bargaining for state and local government workers -- something no state had done in more than 30 years.
Ten months later, a lopsided referendum repealed it. A coalition of unions -- backed by a war chest with more than $4 million in donations -- overpowered the humbler grassroots campaign, which spent only $130,000 and relied almost entirely on unpaid volunteers. In the end, the unions persevered via asymmetric political combat. And again, that was in Utah -- a state not exactly considered a hotbed of unionization.
Meanwhile, Big Labor's strongholds in traditionally blue states are becoming even more fortified. Connecticut's state employee union coalition just reached a deal expected to cost taxpayers about $722 million in additional wages by 2029. Rhode Island passed seven separate pro-union bills in a single legislative session, expanding bargaining rights to new groups of workers -- even though the state already lets unions charge nonmembers for services the unions can choose not to provide.
None of this is happening because workers suddenly want to unionize more than they used to. It's happening because a small number of well-funded union leaders have gotten better at gaming the legislative process.
Taxpayers and workers end up paying the price. Every resource dedicated to government unions -- every hour a worker spends doing union business on the taxpayer's dime, every home address handed over without a worker's say, every arbitration deal that locks in costs a school district never agreed to -- shifts power away from elected officials and toward union leadership.
To paraphrase the traditional union chant, this is what democracy doesn't look like.
David R. Osborne is the senior director of labor policy with the Commonwealth Foundation.