Despite shrinking union numbers, NJ labor groups have had recent bargaining success
Taken from NorthJersey.com
By David Munoz
August 30, 2025
Union membership saw a brief spike after the COVID-19 pandemic but has continued a long-term decline.
- Concerns exist regarding potential weakening of worker rights under the Trump administration and the NLRB’s inactivity.
- New Jersey has state-level worker protections that may mitigate the impact of federal rollbacks.
While Labor Day marks the unofficial end to the summer for many, the national holiday was designed to celebrate the hard-won achievements of America’s labor movement. The holiday has its roots in the 19th century as labor unions grappled with unsafe working conditions, low hours and long pay.
Despite a long-term trend of declining union membership in the U.S., labor action is alive and well in New Jersey and can still produce results at the bargaining table, as the Garden State has recently seen.
A strike by NJ Transit’s locomotive engineers lasted an entire weekend in May over pay issues, while dockworkers at the Port of Newark and Elizabeth went on strike last fall for a new contract.
The union representing 500 nurses and health professionals at Bergen New Bridge Medical Center reached an agreement in May that includes lower staff-to-patient ratios after the union voted to authorize a strike if a new deal was not reached.
Improving staff-to-patient ratios has been a key component of recent contract talks at a number of New Jersey hospitals. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a crisis in hospital staffing across the country, with New Jersey hospitals being among the most affected by the pandemic and staffing shortages.
And in 2023, 9,000 staff at Rutgers University went on a historic strike shortly before final exams to demand that wage increases and greater job security be included in a new contract.
Organizers of the five-day Rutgers strike said the point of the labor action was to keep pressure on university management to achieve a better contract. “This has been something that we’ve long sought,” Bryan Sacks, vice president of the Adjunct Faculty Union, said when a deal was reached. ”We had almost no job security provisions with any teeth in previous contracts.”
Despite uptick after COVID, union membership declines nationally
Union membership in the U.S. spiked coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, from 7 million people in 2021 to 7.2 million people in 2022, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The low wages, irregular schedules and difficult work environments that are common in the hospitality industry have contributed to the shortage of workers willing to fill these positions,” Todd Vachon, a Rutgers University professor and director of the school’s Labor Education Action Research Network, which partners with worker-rights groups, said at the time.
The spike, however, was a brief reversal of a decades-long trend, which saw union membership drop from 20.1% of the national workforce in 1983 to 10.1% in 2022. Union membership further dropped to a record-low of 9.9% in 2024, according to the BLS.
Shrinking worker union membership has been attributed to a decline in the number of jobs in fields that were traditionally represented by unions, such as manufacturing, and their replacement with non-unionized jobs in the service industry and elsewhere.
Labor laws, including those around collective bargaining, have been weakened, according to the left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute
Twenty-seven states now have “right-to-work” laws that prohibit a worker from being compelled to join their union. Critics argue that “right-to-work” laws weaken workplace unions by letting workers opt out of paying union dues, thereby undermining the union’s financial standing.
Critics worry Trump could weaken worker rights
The National Labor Relations Board, which regulates workplace labor union laws, issued a statement on Aug. 15 in response to several states trying to pass laws that would give those states the authority to oversee labor unions.
In the statement, NLRB Acting General Counsel William Cowen said that state efforts to oversee private sector labor disputes would be preempted by the federal-level National Labor Relations Act, and are therefore not allowed.
Shortly after taking office in January, President Donald Trump removed Gwynne Wilcox from the NRLB board. Critics say the move effectively hobbled the agency’s ability to carry out its mission by ensuring the agency board lacked a quorum.
Hundreds of cases are pending before the NLRB, which has not taken any action since March, Reuters has reported, and recently an appeals court sided with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and several other companies trying to argue that the structure of the NLRB is unconstitutional.
“This has triggered a sharp decline in union organizing before the board because the agency does not have a quorum to function and the White House has announced appointments designed to produce policies as — or more — anti-labor than in the first term,” said William Gould, who chaired the NLRB during the presidency of Bill Clinton.
Unions that have relied on the legal avenue of the NLRB will not have that route during the Trump administration, said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University.
“The union has to use its power in the workforce, in the community, interfering with the company’s growth or profit or key relationships to make it that the cost of challenging the union is greater than the cost of not challenging the union,” Bronfenbrenner told NorthJersey.com.
“It’s all about costing the employer, whether it’s money or relationships or access or ability to expand,” she continued.
And some unions have been good at that, such as the Service Employees International Union, which represents workers like cleaning staff; the Communications Workers of America; and Unite Here, which represents workers such as hotel staff.
New Jersey has its own level of worker protections
New Jersey Labor Commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo said in a March interview that the state has its own mechanisms that could be used to enforce workplace safety rules should Trump weaken those rules at the federal level.
The state has its own workplace anti-discrimination laws, for instance, and wields the power to issue stop-work orders against businesses that violate wage and hour laws, Terri Gerstein, a former deputy commissioner of the New York Labor Department who is now director of the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative in Manhattan, said earlier this year.
“In the current federal landscape, with rollbacks of workers’ rights and hollowing of federal worker protection agencies, states need to play a leading role in protecting and advancing workers’ rights,” said Gerstein, “including safeguarding workers’ right to organize.”