Construction Unions Face Fork In The Road: Shrink Or Seize The Moment

The country’s unionized construction workforce, largely consisting of workers whose march toward retirement shrinks the overall construction employment pool, has reached a record low at just 10.7%, according to a release from Associated Builders and Contractors, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data. 

At the same time, unions in industries from auto manufacturing to Hollywood have notched wins in the past year, and provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Law give unions more favorable terrain to expand membership. 

“This is the best shot the unions have had in decades,” said Joshua Freeman, a Queens College, City University of New York history professor. “There’s low unemployment, a sympathetic administration, an infrastructure ramp and sympathetic public attitudes. Lots of things are going in the right direction for unions.”

A reversal of fortune can’t come soon enough if unions want to boost their numbers. The size of the union workforce and its ability to scale up is especially important given the key role it is set to play in the Biden administration’s investment in a green transition.  

The IRA alone provided $270B in tax credits and incentives for clean energy projects in its first year, providing 30% incentives for project costs, conditioned on prevailing wage, project labor agreements and apprenticeship requirements. A federal executive order on PLAs will add to that impact: A final rule on the order was published in January and is expected to impact more than 100 projects annually with an average budget of $114M each.

Some nonunion contractors believe these policies in new federal legislation will create a roadblock, slowing down construction that may sabotage larger goals. The solar industry has raised alarms about a shortage of apprentices and trained labor.

“It’s concerning to our members when they see the White House and the administration pushing policies that are very much pro-union because we've got the skilled labor shortage,” said Ben Brubeck, vice president of regulatory, labor and state affairs for the ABC, an industry group that has fought against pro-union legislation like the PRO Act and pushed back against the use of PLAs.

“They’re really undermining the goals of their legislative agenda and their policy agenda with infrastructure, because there aren't enough union workers to do all this,” he said.

Unions, however, see this moment as a chance to replenish their numbers and expand into fast-growing sectors of the economy. For them, it is a historic opportunity for growth and an opportunity to leverage the green transition and government infrastructure investments to obtain more equitable working conditions and grow the power of the working class.

Union membership in construction trades hit roughly 90% in the 1930s, and due to past perceptions, media portrayals and the concentration in larger cities, it may seem much larger today than it is.

But due to decades of “right-to-work” laws, union scandals, the expansion of jobs outside of union strongholds and animus from business interests, union membership has steadily shrunk. The Business Roundtable lobby was formed in 1972 in part from the Construction Users Anti-Inflation Roundtable.

Data from unionstats.com suggests that 38.1% of workers in the industry were part of a union in 1973, a figure that hit 20% in 1999.

The Great Recession, which caused a raft of early retirements, and the pandemic hammered the already-aging union workforce. 

“You’re absolutely right having a mental image of a very highly unionized sector,”  Freeman said. “But that image comes from 50 years ago, and there really has been a steady decline. There has been like 50 years of purchasers of buildings, developers and construction companies trying to weaken union power.”

The IRA, passed in 2022, has already shown the ability to create jobs. The White House estimated the economy added 22,000 jobs in electric power transmission and distribution, solar power generation, wind power and hydroelectric power between January 2021 and March 2023. A report by Environmental Entrepreneurs estimates that the projects created in the first year of the IRA will result in 303,000 construction jobs and 99,000 long-term operational roles. 

Can construction unions seize this momentum? Union popularity, especially in terms of public perception, hit a peak recently. But even in the past year, when union drives at Starbucks and the United Auto Workers have garnered headlines and high-profile success, overall union membership shrank. That goes for construction as well.

“If you look at the construction industry, it grew by about 250,000 workers last year,” Brubeck said. “But union membership was down 65,000.” 

Union reps say that while BLS stats are accurate, that 10.7% figure can be misleading. Gary LaBarbera, president of the New York City and state Building and Construction Trades Councils, told Bisnow the figure “essentially amounts to copying and pasting numbers from the BLS report and dressing them up with the ABC's typical anti-worker talking points.”

First, it includes accountants, architects and office workers, who aren’t craft workers and aren’t typically unionized, said Tom Kriger, director of research for North America’s Building Trades Unions, or NABTU. Excluding those workers from the density calculations, union members are 18% of the overall craft workforce. 

Excluding residential construction, which also has low union density, the result is that unions represent 30% of the remaining sectors of the construction industry, including commercial, institutional, heavy/highway and industrial construction. Kriger didn’t provide exact membership figures, pointing to the decentralized nature of the different construction trades.  

There are also significant regional differences. Unionstats.com found that many cities in pro-union states have union construction membership in the high teens or even 20% range, while metro areas in the Southeast tend to be in the single digits.

The worker shortage does have lots of experts worried. Barry LePatner, a construction attorney, said he is seriously concerned that the shortfall of skilled workers will keep growing because the industry simply hasn’t done a good job of self-promotion, even though it is set to have a decade of growing demand for high-paying jobs.

Union reps say contractors seek to take advantage of this significant public subsidy to invest in workers or give them a chance to go through the union’s apprenticeship program. They don’t see a shortage. Rather, they see the start of a ramp-up of training and new apprentices that will benefit from new projects over the coming years and represent a more diverse workforce and union efforts at recruiting formerly underrepresented communities.

The IRA's apprenticeship utilization is a “real game-changer,” said Patrick Crowley, secretary-treasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, which represents about 15,000 construction workers. He said that instead of a “race to the bottom” as a new industry grows over the next decade, it is making sure new employees in the sector have good-paying union jobs and that union workers can transition into new roles.  

It is also helping diversify the industry, which is much whiter and older — with a 53-year-old white male as its average worker — than the nation at large. Rhode Island, where 16% of the workforce is part of a union, has been pushing union-led training for emerging industries such as offshore wind.

“The IRA provisions are going to make sure that that transition doesn't exploit this new group of workers just because of who they are and what they look like,” Crowley said.

Construction labor responds to business cycles and tends to be the first to be cut and the last to hire, Kriger said. Now is a moment when demand, strengthened by federal subsidies and policies, supports a significant push for members and training. He said NABTU affiliates have taken an average of 75,000 new apprentices every year for the last five years.

Programs like Building Futures, a pre-apprenticeship program that provides inroads to long-term training, have also increased the number of people in training. In Rhode Island, Building Futures has trained thousands, and 80% of graduates are people of color, while 42% were formerly incarcerated. 

“These are flush times for us,” Kriger said. “Infrastructure work and manufacturing construction have really gone up.”

Brubeck pointed to the relatively low percentage of unionized workers in states like Texas and Florida and said that pro-union policies will make it hard to finish necessary skilled trade work. Electric vehicle charging installations are backed up because there simply aren’t enough union electricians, he said, adding they require too long to train. 

Unions, however, see this as an opportunity to expand their footprint in these states, including for large-scale factory and manufacturing plant projects in the so-called Battery Belt across the Southeast. Crowley said there has been ground gained in Texas, which has a significant number of IRA-funded projects in the pipeline.

It won’t be easy. Freeman said raising total union membership is difficult, even in favorable terrain. Approximately 15% of union members retire every year. 

Crowley and others see the unions just getting started on this transition. In Rhode Island, they have seen construction union membership grow over the last five years, and since the Biden administration “doubled down” on unions, he sees growth accelerating.

“This is going to be a ramping-up period over the next few years,” he said. “We're anticipating this nice upward slope of work.”