U.S. companies spend $1.7 billion annually to halt union formation 

The organized group of Uber and Lyft drivers is a rare—though increasingly less so—example of new unions forming in the U.S. In 2025, just 16.5 million U.S. workers, or one-tenth of the workforce, belonged to a labor union. That’s the highest number of unionized workers in 16 years, an increase of 463,000 since 2024. Still, unionization is far from its peak in 1954, when one in three Americans belonged to a union. 

U.S. employers spent an estimated $1.7 billion last year on union opposition, according to a study from union-busting watchdog LaborLab and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive, pro-union think tank. This estimate encompasses total spending on attorneys’ services, including for representation and consulting, and non-attorney consultants.  

Unionized jobs typically provide higher wages and better benefits, which can lead to opposition from employers, who bear the costs of providing those benefits. Last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending collective bargaining with federal labor unions. Federal workers are far from the only ones facing strong opposition to unionization. 

The spending goes toward preventing union elections—and when they do happen, to get employees to vote against union formation. Consultants also work to stall negotiations for collective bargaining agreements, and employers take advantage of the National Labor Relations Board’s processes to create delays for workers, according to the study. 

“In a lot of cases, employers could take the money that they choose to spend on these consultants and attorneys, and rather than spend it on their workers in the form of a decent raise and a first contract,” Teke Wiggin, one of the study’s authors and the strategic coordinator at LaborLab, told Fortune. “Instead of doing what they’re doing, they could recognize the union and negotiate a decent first contract, and they would often be spending the same amount of money.” 

“It’s just a shame that that doesn’t happen more often,” Wiggin continued.

Under the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), employers are required to disclose money spent on consultants hired to persuade or not persuade employees to organize and engage in collective bargaining. More general “advice” services, which the study described as “ill-defined,” are exempted from reporting, which means the total spending on union opposition is likely much higher. 

In 2024, a total of 153 employers filed a financial disclosure related to hiring a union consultant—but more than 3,200 union election petitions were filed, showing significant underreporting as more than 70% of employees hire consultants when faced with union organizing, a separate LaborLab report shows. If most “advice” provided by consultants were included, EPI estimates employers spend $442 million per year on both attorney and non-attorney consultants for anti-union campaign services, not including representation or counsel. 

One of the highest spenders, Amazon, reported spending $26 million on union consultants, the study found. The company paid anti-union consulting firm The Rayla Group more than $5 million, according to its 2025 LM-10 union consultant expenditure report. 

An Amazon spokesperson told Fortune the company has invested more than $1 billion annually to raise pay and lower health care costs for its U.S. fulfillment and transportation employees. 

“External groups spent an extraordinary amount of time and money to spread misinformation—frequently and illegally lying to, or intimidating our teammates and partners,” Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson told Fortune in a statement. 

“It’s important that our teammates and partners understand the truth, so we’ve continued to work with experts in the field who are able to share objective facts about what it actually means to have an external party take their voice,” Stephenson continued. “And when the facts are shared and understood, what we’ve seen is that our teammates and partners consistently prefer a direct relationship with their managers and overwhelmingly reject misinformation.”