Happy Labor Day!
Today’s Daily Dispatch is a brief, worker-focused holiday edition. We’ll be back Tuesday with our regular newsletter and you can always see all our stories on IowaCapitalDispatch.com.
Teamsters Local 238 Secretary-Treasurer Jesse Case, left, and Jennifer Sherer, deputy director of Economic Policy Institute Economic Analysis and Research Network, speak on Iowa Press on Sept. 4, 2026. (Screenshot from “Iowa Press” video/Iowa PBS)
As the United States honors the efforts of its labor movement and workers this Labor Day Weekend, Iowa labor experts say workers are “making the labor movement every day,” amidst weaker bargaining laws, attacks from corporations and other challenges everyone is facing, whether they hold a union card or not.
In 2025, the U.S. union membership rate was 10%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and currently just over 100,000 Iowans are union members, or around 6.8% of the population.
Members of Virginia Professional Firefighters association hold signs during their biannual convention in May to protest Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s veto of collective bargaining legislation. New research found a significant spike in labor union membership, but growth is highly dependent upon state politics. (Photo by Charlotte Rene Woods/Virginia Mercury)
Labor union membership continues to climb in the United States, though the increase remains sharply divided by the politics of individual states, Stateline reports.
Last year, the nation added more than 411,000 union members — the largest annual growth since 2008, according to a study published just ahead of the Labor Day holiday by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
COMMENTARY
“Iowa’s apprenticeship investments already recognize that employers benefit when learning happens inside real work. AI should strengthen that principle rather than undermine it,” guest columnist Gleb Tsipursky writes.
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