Labor Day

Tagged stories

Workers walking through a large distribution warehouse lined with pallet racking, captured with motion blur.
The Numbers

The Best Organising Year in Decades Still Loses Ground

Workers won NLRB elections at the highest rate in decades last year — 93,517 of them, up 19 percent. Union density is 10.0 percent, and 14.7 million members in a workforce of about 147 million. Both numbers are real. One is a flow and the other is a stock, and the arithmetic between them is unforgiving.

An open-plan office with unoccupied desks and dark monitor screens.
The Long View

The Unemployment Rate Cannot See a Job That Was Never Offered

Employment for 22- to 25-year-olds in AI-exposed occupations is down about 16 percent, and companies adopting AI have cut junior hiring by around 13 percent. Aggregate unemployment among AI-exposed workers shows no detectable rise since late 2022. All three findings are consistent, because only one of them measures a door that stopped opening.