Jesse Case, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 238, and Jennifer Sherer, deputy director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Economic Analysis and Research Network and director of the institute’s Worker Power Project, spoke on “Iowa Press” Sept. 4 about efforts of some Iowans to unionize and the issues impacting unionized workers in the state and across the country.
Sherer told “Iowa Press” moderator Kay Henderson and Gazette Des Moines Bureau Chief Erin Murphy that this is a difficult period for Iowa workers, and that in the 30 years she’s lived in Iowa, the state’s union representation density has fallen from above to below the national average.
In 2025, the U.S. union membership rate was 10%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Henderson said currently just over 100,000 Iowans are union members, or around 6.8% of the population.
“But that’s not the end of this history,” Sherer said. “Workers are still rewriting it today, and this Labor Day and the next election cycle and everything that comes after will probably write the next chapter.”
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According to a May Economic Policy Institute report cited by Sherer in the discussion, UnityPoint Health spent more than $2.1 million on “union avoidance consultants” in 2025. The healthcare company came in second to Amazon, which spent more than $26.6 million, and the total spent on union avoidance topped $1.5 billion in the U.S.