Why do employees organize and join a union? Littler data has insight.

Dive Brief:

• Outside of compensation, the main reasons employees unionize include a desire for better work/life balance, more input into business decisions and more job security, said employers who had experienced unionization over the past two years and who had been polled for Littler’s 2025 Labor Survey Report.
• Meanwhile, the majority of employers without unionized employees said they believed 30% or less of their employees would agree to join a union today — highlighting a potential disconnect. 
• “Data from other surveys suggest these respondents may be underestimating the willingness of their employees to at least consider joining a union,” Littler said in its report.

Dive Insight:

Employers usually run into trouble during unionization efforts; often, the way a company handles the collective bargaining process either gets called out by their workers or brought to the National Labor Relations Board for legal scrutiny. Notably, at the end of 2023, Costco leadership issued an open letter where they called the unionization of Norfolk, Virginia, workers “a failure on our part.”

Sympathetic employers may be in short supply, but the tide may be turning from a worker standpoint.

A different September report from Littler also noted that union membership has gone down, but that states are increasingly passing legislation to either restrict or all-out ban “captive audience” meetings. The report also mentioned the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which seeks to speed up labor-management negotiations. 

Littler noted that the bill has been “mostly supported by Democrats and is strongly opposed by the business community, not only because it speeds up the process of collective bargaining, but because the bill would for the first time allow outsiders to compel employers to agree to specific bargaining agreements.” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced the bill.

Overall, the Littler report suggested that employee engagement programs would “reduce the likelihood of unionization by creating workplaces where employees feel valued and heard.” 

The report goes further to say that the lack of employee listening initiatives are “a missed opportunity, as these forums — which are designed to enable employees to share their opinions, ideas, and concerns — are a critical factor in union curiosity becoming union activity or an NLRB petition.”