For only the second time in a quarter century, a majority of Republicans — 52% — approve of labor unions, according to a new Gallup poll.

Why it matters: Despite Americans' rising approval, union membership remains near a modern low. Congress has repeatedly blocked labor's biggest priorities, and House Republicans are now investigating unions, even as their own voters approve of them.

  • Republicans' warmer feelings toward unions don't translate into wanting them to wield more power: 49% of Republicans want unions to have less influence, compared with just 19% who want them to have more.
Data: Gallup Poll Social Series; Chart: Andrew Pantazi/Axios

By the numbers: Overall, 71% of Americans approved of unions, tying the 2022 level. Gallup last recorded higher approval in 1959 at 73%.

  • Approval stands at 89% among Democrats, 70% among independents and 52% among Republicans. The only other time since 2001 that Gallup found majority Republican approval was in 2022.
  • A record 47% of Americans want unions to have more influence, more than double the 23% who want less influence. Another 26% want their influence to remain the same.

The big picture: The latest numbers mark a reversal from the Great Recession. In 2009, union approval bottomed out at 48%, and 42% of Americans wanted unions to have less influence while just 25% wanted them to have more.

Reality check: Americans are embracing unions at a time when few workers belong to one. Just 11% of U.S. workers — 16.5 million — were represented by unions in 2025, compared with 23% and 20.5 million workers in 1983, the first year of comparable data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  • The most recent year included union representation for less than 7% of private-sector workers.

State of play: Workers have been trying to make up for lost time. Union election petitions filed with the National Labor Relations Board more than doubled from 2021 to 3,286 in 2024. The agency received 2,633 election petitions last year, down from the prior year's peak but still well above earlier years.

  • Americans are skeptical that today's goodwill will translate into greater strength. Just 27% expect unions to become stronger, while 39% expect them to weaken and 29% expect little change, according to the Gallup polling.
Data: Gallup Poll Social Series; Chart: Andrew Pantazi/Axios

Zoom in: Organized labor has repeatedly failed to turn Democratic control of Washington into its biggest legislative prize: rewriting federal law to make it easier for workers to join unions and to win contracts.

  • The Employee Free Choice Act, a signature priority at the start of the Obama administration, would have made it easier for workers to unionize when a majority of workers signed cards. Despite overwhelming Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, it never became law.
  • In 2021, the House passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, the next sweeping attempt to rewrite federal labor law, with five Republicans joining Democrats.
  • But it stalled in the Senate where Republicans and even Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly, Mark Warner and Kyrsten Sinema withheld their support.

Between the lines: President Biden leaned on executive action and appointments, creating a task force to promote organizing and pushing the NLRB to favor unionizing workers. In 2023, he became the first president to join striking workers on a picket line, standing with autoworkers in Michigan.

  • The environment has swung sharply. President Trump has used executive orders to remove collective bargaining rights for broad swaths of the federal workforce and to fire the labor board's pro-union general counsel and a Democratic board member.

The latest: House Republicans have also intensified scrutiny of union leadership, launching investigations into the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, the American Federation of Teachers and three railroad unions, demanding records about political activity.

The bottom line: Labor has won back popularity it lost during decades of decline, but its harder fight is turning that goodwill into bargaining power and growing its membership.

The fine print: Gallup surveyed 1,200 U.S. adults by cellphone and landline Aug. 3–24. The overall margin of error is 4 percentage points.