How do you start a union at work?

Workers sign authorization cards stating they want a specific union to represent them. Once a union has cards from a meaningful share of the group it wants to organize, usually well over the 30 percent minimum, it files a representation petition with the NLRB. The Board then investigates the petition, sets an election, and workers vote by secret ballot.

What percentage of workers need to sign cards for a union election?

The NLRB requires cards or other signed support from at least 30 percent of the proposed bargaining unit before it will process a petition, sometimes called the showing of interest. In practice, unions rarely file at exactly 30 percent; most wait until they have cards from a clear majority, because a campaign that starts at a bare 30 percent tends to lose.

How long does a union election take?

There is no fixed number of days written into the statute, but the NLRB's current procedural rule, effective since December 26, 2023, is built to move fast: pre-election hearings open about 10 days sooner than under the prior rule, and elections are scheduled for the earliest practicable date once a director orders one, with no mandatory 20-business-day wait beforehand.

What happens after workers vote yes in a union election?

The NLRB certifies the union as the exclusive bargaining representative for that unit, and the employer has a legal duty to bargain in good faith over a first contract. Certification is not a contract. Bargaining a first agreement is a separate process with no deadline, and a large share of newly certified unions do not reach one within a year.

Can an employer just ignore a union election result?

No. Refusing to bargain after certification is itself an unfair labor practice the union can charge to the NLRB. But the law does not set a deadline for reaching an agreement, and an employer that bargains slowly, without technically refusing, is not automatically violating anything.

How a union election actually works

A union election in the United States runs on a sequence fixed by federal law: cards, a petition, a hearing if the parties disagree, a secret ballot, and certification. The sequence has not changed since 1935. What changes, and has changed twice in the last decade, is how fast each step is allowed to move.

Cards come before anything is filed

Nothing happens until workers sign authorization cards, one-line statements that a named worker wants a named union to represent them for bargaining. There is no government form for this stage; a union runs its own count, usually in secret, building support one conversation at a time. The National Labor Relations Board will not process a representation petition without proof that at least 30 percent of the workers in the proposed group support it, a threshold the NLRB calls the showing of interest. Almost no union actually files at 30 percent. Organizers who have studied election outcomes advise waiting for signed support well past a bare majority, because a campaign that files thin has already told the employer, and the workers who have not signed yet, how close the vote will be.

The petition defines who gets to vote

Filing the petition is a legal act with a specific shape. The union has to describe the bargaining unit, the group of job titles and locations it wants to represent, and that description becomes the single most litigated part of the whole process. Include a department the employer doesn’t want unionized and the employer will fight to add it, diluting the vote. Leave one out that wanted in and it stays out. Once the petition lands, the employer has to post and, if it normally communicates electronically, distribute a Notice of Petition for Election, telling every affected worker that a vote is coming.

The hearing, when there is one

Most petitions never reach a contested hearing. NLRB regional staff investigate jurisdiction and eligibility, and in the majority of cases the union and employer agree on the unit and the election details without a fight. When they don’t agree, the regional office holds a pre-election hearing to decide who’s eligible to vote and whether an election should happen at all.

The rules governing that hearing have moved back and forth. A 2019 rule, adopted under the first Trump-era Board, added a written statement-of-position stage and a 20 business-day wait between the order for an election and the vote itself, among other delays. The Board rescinded that rule effective December 26, 2023, restoring procedures closer to a 2014 rule: pre-election hearings now open roughly 10 days sooner than they did under the 2019 rule, employers post the election notice about 3 days sooner, and the mandatory 20-business-day wait before the vote is gone entirely. Under the current rule, once a regional director orders an election, it is scheduled for “the earliest date practicable.” That status was current as of August 29, 2026, per the NLRB’s own fact sheet on the rule; representation-case procedure has changed by rulemaking twice in the last decade, so a campaign checking this today should confirm nothing has moved again.

Winning the vote takes a majority of ballots cast, not of the unit

Workers vote by secret ballot, usually at the workplace during working hours, under NLRB supervision. The union wins with a simple majority of votes actually cast. A unit of 200 workers where only 90 vote and the union takes 46 of them has won, regardless of the other 110 who stayed home; nonvoters are not counted as no votes, they are not counted at all. Either side can challenge specific ballots or file objections to the conduct of the election, which can trigger a post-election hearing before certification becomes final. In the year studied in the NLRB’s own 2016 review of the 2015 rule, unions won about two-thirds of elections held, a win rate that has moved only modestly since.

A union that loses does not get to try again right away. The NLRB’s election bar blocks a new petition for the same unit for 12 months after a lost election, a rule meant to give workers a settled period rather than a rolling re-vote.

Certification is not a contract

Winning the election gets the union certified as the exclusive bargaining representative. It does not produce an agreement. The employer now has a legal duty to bargain in good faith, but nothing in the statute sets a deadline for reaching a contract, and good-faith bargaining is compatible with bargaining slowly.

This is the gap that most accounts of union organizing skip, and it is the one the numbers are worst on. John-Paul Ferguson, in a 2008 study published in ILR Review, built a dataset of more than 22,000 NLRB election drives filed between 1999 and 2004 and modeled them through three stages: filing a petition, winning the election, and reaching a first contract. His finding:

Only one-seventh of organizing drives that filed an election petition with the NLRB managed to reach a first contract within a year of certification.

Ferguson also found that an unfair labor practice charge filed at any point during a drive was associated with a 30 percent lower cumulative chance of ever reaching a first contract, controlling for the fact that campaigns already in trouble are the ones more likely to draw a charge in the first place. Winning the election is a real milestone. It is not the finish line, and a campaign that treats certification as the end of the fight is the campaign most likely to stall in the year that follows.

Where campaigns actually die

Card signing can fail without anyone announcing it, one conversation at a time, long before any petition is filed. A filed petition can lose at the ballot box. And a won election, per Ferguson’s numbers, has worse than one-in-seven odds of turning into a contract inside a year. Each of those is a different failure with a different cause: an organizer’s count that ran ahead of real support, an employer campaign that worked, or a bargaining table where the employer showed up and never moved. Knowing which stage a given campaign died at is the difference between a true postmortem and a slogan.

The rules that govern all three stages have been rewritten twice by rulemaking in the past decade, in 2019 and again in 2023, and each rewrite changed how many days a campaign has to wait. Anyone building an organizing timeline this year should confirm the current procedure directly on the NLRB’s own site rather than trust a date printed in an article, this one included.