WASHINGTON (PAI)—Sixty-eight percent of the U.S. public approves of unions as of Labor Day 2025, the annual Gallup Poll said this week.
This year’s survey, conducted from Aug. 1-20, adds 15% live in a union household, and 9% of all respondents are union members themselves. The rest live with a union member. Factoring out teenagers, 13% of U.S. adults surveyed told Gallup they’re union members.
The pro-union numbers have remained consistent for more than a decade, and so have the partisan splits. Each year shows a huge majority—90% this year—of registered Democrats favor unions, as do 69% of independents, but fewer than half (41%) of Republicans.
The one exception was in 2022 when the pro-union share among Republicans edged over 50% for the first time in more than 20 years. It has regressed since.
The Gallup survey noted the Democratic union support translated into votes last November. It reported union members were the only major group to give the Democratic Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket in 2024 a percentage share equal to that they gave to Joe Biden and Harris four years before.
The all-time high for unions in the Gallup polls occurred in 1953 and 1957, at 75%, which were among the years when organized labor was one-third of the private-sector labor force. The lowest support, at the start of the Nixon administration in 1969, was 48%, with opposition only a percentage point behind.
The AFL-CIO has cited the past Gallup polls as an argument that Americans support unions and their political positions, but that hasn’t necessarily translated into either federal legislation or victories by pro-worker candidates.
The legislation, along with labor law enforcement, is stymied, stalled, or killed by capitalist opposition, along with court rulings that turn union organizing drives into an obstacle course.
As a result, general labor law changes have been killed ever since a Republican-run Congress passed the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959. It, in turn, followed the 1947 Republican-passed Taft-Hartley Act, which basically neutered the original 1935 National Labor Relations Act.
The same day Gallup released the pro-union poll results, it released another interesting poll. It asked the question, splitting again into partisan shares, “Do you think the country is going in the right direction?” It did not include the usual “right/wrong” choice.
The results were striking. Reflecting the complete Trump/MAGA takeover of the GOP, 76% of Republicans voted for “right direction.” Only 39% of independents said the same.
The number of Democrats voting “right direction” was 0.4%, which, as Gallup said in a footnote, “rounded to zero in our graphic.”
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