“After decades of declining union membership, organized labor may be on the verge of a resurgence in the U.S.” claimed the New York Times last week, echoing dozens of similar claims lately. But how solid is the case for such a union comeback, and if it happens is it likely to be broad or narrow? The Economist invited me to write a guest column on the topic, which was published last week.

I begin with figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which found the share of American workers belonging to unions fell last year, not rose, from 10.8% to 10.3%, back to its 2019 share and far below 1983’s 20.1% or the all time peak of 34.8% in 1954. Overall, union membership in the United States fell last year by 241,000 to 14 million.

How can this be so when we keep reading stories about organizing drives at high-profile workplaces? Unions have lately signed up workers at media outlets like Vox, BuzzFeed, New York magazine and the New Yorker, as well as at well-known advocacy and arts nonprofits.

What’s going on here, I argue, may owe more to culture than to questions of pay and promotion. Sectors hit lately with union ferment tend to have youthful, well-educated and aspirational workforces. “Many of these jobs attract a generation whose members often have strong opinions on social issues, and perhaps see the workplace as more than just the vehicle for a paycheck.” After years of looking for a breakthrough in fast-food organizing, unions found it not at, say, Kentucky Fried Chicken but at Starbucks.

Relatedly, the New York Times in its interview with labor reporter Noam Scheiber notes that “college-educated workers have been heavily involved” in recent organizing drives, often “people with radical politics taking jobs with the explicit intention of organizing workers.” Scheiber’s example is a Rhodes Scholar who “wore a Karl Marx sweatshirt at Oxford”; back stateside she proceeded to take a job as a barista at a Buffalo Starbucks, successfully organizing fellow workers there and then reaching out to other outlets of the same chain. (The campus-radical-to-union-star pipeline, to be sure, is hardly new.)

The column, which is paywalled, tackles many other angles of the subject, from public opinion to the role of government worker unions. The takeaway: unions are getting a boost of sorts from being seen as vehicles for social justice, but a campaigning view of social justice is not a majority taste, even among the young and mobile. “There’s a reason organizers report more success among staff at national environmental organizations than among, say, drywall installers, a sector employing 140,000.”