As part of our follow-up to LRIRightNow’s 2025 NLRB Review, we looked at the standout statistics. We also discussed why healthcare unions’ 88% win rate doesn’t tell the whole story about how unions do disservice to workers, hospitals, and communities that they serve.
Now it’s time to look at which unions are awful at winning elections and why. UAW president Shawn Fain won’t be happy about this, but here are the biggest losers, according to Page 8 of our report:
UAW: 58% (14 wins, 10 losses)
UFCW: 63% (55 wins, 32 losses)
RWDSU (UFCW’s retail affiliate): 64% (7 wins, 4 losses)
Plumbers & Pipe Workers: 48% (16 wins, 17 losses)
Steelworkers: 67% (14 wins, 7 losses)
Below this chart, we will explore the reasons why these unions fall behind the 78% overall win rate for 2025 representation elections.
The UAW’s Southern Struggles are Only the Beginning
The UAW’s 58% win rate is 30% behind healthcare unions for a few key reasons: (1) The union’s waning Southern momentum; (2) The UAW’s desperate pivot away from actual auto workers, suggesting that fewer of their traditional targets remain. Additionally, Fain’s troubles with the union’s federal monitor don’t help the situation. Let’s look closer.
Although the UAW’s first Southern auto plant victory at Volkswagen in Chattanooga generated headlines in Apr. 2024, the union lost decisively at Mercedes-Benz in Alabama one month later. The union also refused to allow members to vote on Volkswagen’s final contract offer. A budding VW decertification effort points toward waning worker support for the union’s vow to conquer the South.
With the Mercedes Alabama loss, multiple factors led to UAW defeat, including how auto workers in this state already receive competitive wages. This, along with union contracts favoring seniority for everything from wage increases to claimed job security, makes joining a union far less attractive.
Then there’s the fact that the UAW’s membership is increasingly made up of workers who, to be blunt, are not auto workers. In 2025, the union only held about a handful of elections for auto-worker units and leaned harder into organizing museum, movie theater, and clerical workers. The UAW also continued pursuing higher-ed workers, which recently made up around 25-30% of the union’s total membership.
Undeniably, the UAW’s intense poaching beyond their wheelhouse reveals their worries about the future. That’s only to be expected after they fell from their 1979 peak of 1.5 million members to their current claim of 400,000 active members. The union’s legacy of corruption also surely doesn’t impress workers, especially after the federal monitor issued several damaging reports. Further, this union’s own staffers are miserable, so why would workers want to sign up for their representation?
Exactly.
The UFCW’s Lackluster Retail Showing Persists
The UFCW claims 1.2 million members but struggled to pull their win rate much above 60%. The same goes for affiliate RWDSU, and the writing has been on the wall. A few years ago, former UFCW Local 300 organizing director, Matt Loveday, saw this coming while conceding that UFCW’s overall win rate is “very, very poor” with retail and grocery workers.
Case in point: The union tried and failed for decades to organize Walmart workers. And in 2025, the union won one election at Whole Foods but lost many more at Tom Thumb and Albertson’s grocery chains and several smaller grocers.
Considering how much dues money this union takes in from over 1 million members, they can certainly fund organizing campaigns. That doesn’t guarantee effective execution, and organizing retail and grocery workers in a high-turnover industry is notoriously difficult. It also doesn’t help UFCW that their 2025 grocery contracts were labeled as “sellouts” and likely convinced some workers to vote against representation during elections.
Building Trades Workers Want to Build Their Own Path
These unions’ number of elections pales in contrast to their size. The Plumbers claim 390,000 members but saw 33 campaigns through to election. Whereas the Steelworkers claim 850,000 members but only held 21 elections. The Steelworkers fared better with a 67% win rate than the Plumbers’ 48%, but both unions fell below the overall 78% average.
The low number of elections from both unions could point toward high job satisfaction from workers who see no need to unionize. Additionally, the Plumbers’ units were small, often in the single digits, and it’s likely that these workers realized that they would be restricting their earning potential and losing other freedoms by living under a union constitution. For the Steelworkers, this industry’s global competitiveness likely causes workers to shun how unions protest technological advancements during contract negotiations, leading to strikes that harm workers’ pocketbooks.
What Separates “Winner” Unions from Losers
Aside from the healthcare industry, which we’ve already discussed, it’s not difficult to figure out why SEIU/Workers United (86%/81%) and Teamsters (71%) have higher win rates.
Much of SEIU’s election success is down to Starbucks Workers United’s momentum, although it’s not much of a “win” when no contract exists more than four years after the first Starbucks cafe unionized.
Meanwhile, the Teamsters have taken a diversified approach to organizing that is proving more successful than the UAW’s attempts. That is to say, the Teamsters still maintain their traditional focus of transportation, logistics, and food processing workers but, in 2025, this union also won elections with casino workers, public defenders, and nurses.
In other words, Sean O’Brien has never met a worker that he doesn’t want to collect dues from, which brings his union additional revenue streams. And Shawn Fain might sometimes wish that he was Sean O’Brien.
What Matters Most: Workers Choose What Works
We’ve talked before at length about how unions fail workers, and workers increasingly know this. They’re not simply buying what organizers are selling, and they’re choosing to make informed decisions while rejecting several organizations that prioritize dues collection over worker well-being.
Workers have made clear what they want: Responsive leadership, clear advancement paths, workplace cultures that make them happy to get out of bed, and competitive wages. They want the kind of employer that makes union representation obviously unnecessary. For that reason and many more, union organizing drives are worth fighting, rather than voluntarily recognizing third-party representation.
