The Trump Biden "Unions Situation" Reveals A Lot

Watch The Full Philip DeFranco Show: https://www.youtube.com/defranco?sub_confirmation=1 Subscribe for more Quickie News: https://www.youtube.com/defranco?sub_confirmation=1 Union membership hit an all-time low in 2022, then got even lower in 2023, then even lower in 2024. With that leaving about 14.3 million workers in unions by the time Trump put his hand on the Bible and said, “I Donald John Trump do solemnly swear.” But then, over the course of the following year, as one of the most labor-hostile presidents in modern American history shredded worker protections, union membership reversed its downward slide. With the ranks of organized labor growing by over 400,000 in 2025, bringing the total number to 14.7 million and pushing union density up by a tenth of a percentage point to 10%. Then, when you count workers who aren’t members of a union but are still covered by a union contract, that number hit the highest level since 2009, at 16 and a half million. So what happened? Is Biden a corporate shill and Trump a working-class champion? Well no, actually it’s quite the opposite; right, a big part of the reason for the shift is that the labor market was doing pretty good under Biden and sucks under Trump. Right, there was the post-pandemic recovery, and even through 2024 the U.S. economy added 2.2 million jobs, so nonunion positions grew faster than union ones, pushing their relative share down. But last year, the labor market grew at its slowest pace outside of a recession since the early 2000s, so unions grabbed a larger share back. Though I should clarify that you can’t just boil down the shift to changes in relative percentages; right, there was an absolute decline in Biden’s last year and a rise in Trump’s first. But that seems to have more to do with the tireless work of labor organizers and less to do with anything Trump can take credit for. —————————— Produced by: Cory Ray, Philip DeFranco Edited by: James Girardier, Maxwell Enright, Julie Goldberg, Christian Meeks, Matthew Henry Art Department: William Crespo Writing/Research: Chris Tolve, Philip DeFranco ———————————— #USA #America #Trump