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Labor relations specialists

Also called Employee relations specialist, Labor relations manager, Union relations specialist, Employee relations manager, Workforce relations specialist

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 64,810 US labor relations specialists, with median pay of $95,420 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 500 from 1926, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for labor relations specialists: People analytics platforms + cloud HRIS contract compliance, 2015 to 2023.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 2.1% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Labor relations specialists: jobs and pay since 1926 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1075

Chicago

Future History. "Labor relations specialists: jobs and pay since 1926." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1075.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_13_1075, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Labor relations specialists: jobs and pay since 1926}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1075}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
1925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Industrial Relations Counselor / Labor Manager (pre-Wagner Act era)
Known then as Labor Relations Manager / Industrial Relations Specialist (Wagner Act era)
Known then as Labor Relations Specialist / Collective Bargaining Specialist (Taft-Hartley era)
Known then as Labor Relations Specialist / Employee Relations Specialist (union-decline era)
Known then as Labor Relations Specialists (BLS SOC 13-1075)
Known today as Labor Relations Specialists (BLS SOC 13-1075)
Projected to still be called Labor Relations Specialists (BLS SOC 13-1075)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
65K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$95,420
Est.

≈ $92,974 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1914

April 20, 1914: National Guard troops and company guards attack the Ludlow tent colony of striking Colorado Fuel and Iron coal miners, killing at least 21 people including 11 children. The Ludlow Massacre forces John D. Rockefeller Jr. to retain William Lyon Mackenzie King to design an alternative to suppression: structured employee representation. The resulting employee representation plan at CF&I in 1915 planted the institutional seed of the labor relations profession.

Beat · 1922

Rockefeller funds an Industrial Relations staff inside his attorney's office to provide expert labor policy analysis, incorporated in 1926 as Industrial Relations Counselors, Inc. -- the first professional organization devoted to labor-management relations in the United States. The same year, Princeton University's Industrial Relations Section is established with Rockefeller support, the first academic research center for labor economics.

Beat · 1935

July 5, 1935: President Roosevelt signs the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act). For the first time, private-sector employers face a statutory duty to recognize and bargain in good faith with certified unions, enforced by the new National Labor Relations Board. The Act transforms labor relations from informal negotiation into a regulated legal process, creating immediate demand for specialists who can navigate NLRB procedures and bargaining obligations.

Beat · 1945

November 1945: Cornell University opens the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations -- the world's first college-level program dedicated to workplace issues including collective bargaining, labor economics, and mediation. The founding cohort of 107 undergraduates and 11 graduate students study collective bargaining, mediation, and arbitration. Within a decade, similar programs open at Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, UCLA, and Harvard, professionalizing the labor relations field.

Beat · 1947

June 23, 1947: The Labor Management Relations Act (Taft-Hartley) is enacted over President Truman's veto. The law creates the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service as an independent agency, requires 60-day notice before strikes, restricts secondary boycotts, and gives employers broader rights to express anti-union views during organizing campaigns. Taft-Hartley makes the legal and procedural demands on labor relations specialists substantially more complex, entrenching the profession as a legal specialty.

Beat · 1954

US union membership peaks at approximately 34.7% of wage and salary workers, with roughly 17 million union members at the apex of the American labor movement. This peak corresponds to the high-water mark of demand for labor relations specialists on both the management and union sides. Private-sector collective bargaining covered industries from auto and steel to airlines and telecommunications, each requiring dedicated specialist teams.

Beat · 1981

August 1981: President Reagan fires 11,359 PATCO air traffic controllers who refuse to return to work after an illegal strike, a turning point that signaled to private-sector employers that aggressive anti-union action would receive government support. The PATCO dismissals accelerated a shift already underway: private-sector employers became more willing to replace strikers, hire union-avoidance consultants, and resist first-contract negotiations. Union density, which had been declining since 1954, accelerated its fall.

Beat · 2023

SAG-AFTRA ratifies its first agreement containing explicit AI consent and compensation provisions for digital replicas (November 2023); the WGA ratifies a parallel agreement prohibiting AI from being credited as a writer (September 2023). The UAW includes AI Letters of Understanding in its 2023 contracts with Ford, GM, and Stellantis. NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issues Memorandum GC 25-01 in January 2025, asserting that employer use of AI tools that affect wages, hours, or working conditions triggers the Section 8(a)(5) duty to bargain. These developments create a new premium specialty at the intersection of labor law and AI governance.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace labor relations specialists? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+2.1%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 13-1075 (Labor relations specialists): 66.3 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 67.7 thousand in 2035, a change of +1.4 thousand (+2.1%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1.2% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
44.3%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 13-1075.00 Labor Relations Specialists. Shown: human-rated β = 0.443, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.113 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.774; GPT-4-rated β 0.547. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for labor relations specialists

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDraft and redline collective bargaining agreement language: using Harvey AI or Microsoft 365 Copilot to generate first-draft contractual provisions, redline counterproposals with tracked changes, compare proposed language against prior contract versions for scope creep, and prepare clean final contract documents for execution.

Draft and redline collective bargaining agreement language: using Harvey AI or Microsoft 365 Copilot to generate first-draft contractual provisions, redline counterproposals with tracked changes, compare proposed language against prior contract versions for scope creep, and prepare clean final contract documents for execution.[8],[6],[7]

Where your edge is

AI excels at generating boilerplate CBA provisions and flagging deviation from prior contract language, but the legal defensibility of novel provisions (especially AI-employment-impact clauses, management-rights language, and just-cause standards) requires practitioner judgment. Build deep fluency in NLRA Section 8(d) bargaining-to-impasse doctrine so you can defend the language you draft if the contract is later arbitrated.

AI is sitting alongside you hereTrack and analyze labor relations intelligence, monitoring union organizing campaigns, contract expiration calendars, and NLRB regional activity using IRI Consultants' labor reporting intelligence

Track and analyze labor relations intelligence, monitoring union organizing campaigns, contract expiration calendars, and NLRB regional activity using IRI Consultants' labor reporting intelligence; reviewing employee sentiment and engagement trends from Culture Amp AI; synthesizing signals into a quarterly labor relations risk briefing for HR leadership and legal counsel.[10],[5]

Where your edge is

AI tools can aggregate and surface signals (engagement scores, organizing activity, contract calendars) efficiently, but translating those signals into a strategic risk assessment (which units are likely to organize, how the current economic climate affects a pending renegotiation, whether a spike in grievances signals a deeper contract-language problem) requires human judgment and institutional knowledge. Position yourself as the synthesizer who turns data into executive-ready insight.

AI is sitting alongside you herePrepare for collective bargaining negotiations: using Bloomberg Law Labor AI or LexisNexis Lexis+ AI to research recent CBA settlements in the industry, benchmarking wage, benefit, and work-rule proposals against AlphaSense's contract-language database, and building the employer's or union's opening proposals with Microsoft 365 Copilot draft assistance.

Prepare for collective bargaining negotiations: using Bloomberg Law Labor AI or LexisNexis Lexis+ AI to research recent CBA settlements in the industry, benchmarking wage, benefit, and work-rule proposals against AlphaSense's contract-language database, and building the employer's or union's opening proposals with Microsoft 365 Copilot draft assistance.[11],[12],[13]

Where your edge is

AI dramatically compresses the research and benchmarking phase (days to hours), but the strategic framing of proposals (which issues to lead with, how to sequence concessions, how to read the counterparty's priorities) requires experienced judgment that no tool replicates. Use the time AI returns you to build deeper industry expertise and deepen relationships with FMCS mediators and opposing counsel.

Where labor relations specialists go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Human Resources Managers

Labor Relations Specialists who develop broad HR policy fluency, people analytics skills, and NLRA compliance expertise are natural candidates for the HR Manager role, particularly at unionized employers where LR expertise commands a premium over generalist HR management skills. AI is absorbing the transactional LR workload (grievance documentation, research, drafting), leaving the strategic and advisory functions that overlap substantially with HR Manager scope.

What you'd add
  • · HR generalist breadth: recruiting, performance management, benefits administration, HRIS
  • · People analytics: Workday, Visier, or similar platform for workforce reporting and planning
  • · Employment law fundamentals beyond the union context: Title VII, ADA, ADEA, FMLA, FLSA
  • · Change management and organizational design: translating business strategy into people plans
  • · PHR/SPHR (HRCI) or SHRM-CP/SHRM-SCP certification to signal generalist credential
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of labor relations specialists changed since 1914?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Employee representation plans + industrial counselors (pre-NLRA era)

    Before the Wagner Act imposed a statutory duty to bargain, labor management was handled through employer-designed "employee representation plans" -- company-controlled committees that gave workers a grievance voice without independent union power. Industrial relations counselors like those at IRC advised employers on designing these plans, conducting labor surveys, and managing the informal negotiation that kept strikes at bay. The toolkit was entirely analog: written surveys, meeting facilitation, and the counselor's personal relationships with worker representatives and plant managers.

    Effect on the work

    IRC's training programs reached thousands of managers in this era, building the first professional cohort of labor relations practitioners at large US employers.

  • NLRA statutory framework + NLRB procedures (Wagner Act era)

    The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 transformed labor relations from informal negotiation into a legally structured process. Employers now faced mandatory recognition of certified unions, a statutory duty to bargain in good faith, and NLRB enforcement of unfair labor practice charges. The specialist's toolkit became predominantly legal: reading board decisions, understanding the scope of the bargaining obligation, structuring proposals to stay within the duty-to-bargain framework, and filing or defending ULP charges. The NLRB's first decade of decisions created a body of precedent that labor relations specialists had to master.

    Effect on the work

    The Wagner Act created demand for specialized labor relations practitioners at every major unionized employer. Union membership grew between 1935 and 1947, driving parallel growth in the specialist workforce.

  • Taft-Hartley procedures + FMCS mediation + collective bargaining agreement libraries

    The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (Taft-Hartley) established the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service as an independent agency, required notice before strikes, restricted union practices, and gave employers broader speech rights during organizing campaigns. For the specialist, Taft-Hartley added a new dimension: managing the notification, mediation, and cooling-off procedures the law imposed. FMCS mediation became a standard tool in the specialist's toolkit, and the agency's publication of CBA settlement data gave practitioners their first systematic access to what other employers were settling for. Written CBA libraries, manually assembled and updated, became the standard research resource -- a shelf of three-ring binders organized by industry and union.

    Effect on the work

    FMCS was established as the nation's largest public dispute-resolution agency in 1947, handling thousands of collective bargaining disputes annually within its first decade. The peak of labor relations specialist employment followed, tracking the 1954 peak of union density at 34.7% of wage and salary workers.

  • Computerized CBA databases + word processing + arbitration award databases

    Word processing (Wang Laboratories' systems in the mid-1970s; WordStar 1978; WordPerfect 1982) transformed how labor relations specialists produced CBA proposals, grievance responses, and arbitration briefs. The physical CBA library of three-ring binders gave way to computerized databases: Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) and Commerce Clearing House (CCH) launched CD-ROM CBA databases in the 1980s, giving specialists searchable access to thousands of agreements across industries. Labor Arbitration Reports (published by BNA from 1946 onward) became searchable in this era. The specialist who once spent days finding comparable CBA language now spent hours. This was the first significant productivity enhancement to the research and drafting workload.

    Effect on the work

    Computerized research and drafting tools made individual specialists more productive, contributing to the partial offset of declining demand from falling union density: fewer specialists were needed per employer, but each managed a larger and more complex docket.

  • Web-based legal research (Bloomberg Law, Westlaw, LexisNexis) + HRIS grievance tracking

    Westlaw and LexisNexis moved from CD-ROM to web-based platforms in the mid-1990s, giving labor relations specialists real-time access to NLRB decisions, federal court labor rulings, and arbitration awards from any connected machine. Bloomberg Law launched in 2009 with a dedicated labor and employment module. At the same time, HRIS platforms (PeopleSoft in the 1990s; SAP HR; Workday from 2005 onward) began offering grievance tracking modules that replaced the paper grievance logs that had been standard since the 1940s. Digital case management let specialists track multi-step grievance procedures across large workforces -- hundreds of cases simultaneously -- in ways that were physically impossible with paper systems. The labor relations specialist's daily workflow shifted from physical library research and paper files to online research and digital case management.

  • People analytics platforms (Visier, Culture Amp) + cloud HRIS contract compliance

    People analytics tools -- Visier (founded 2010, enterprise launch 2015), Culture Amp (founded 2009, wide deployment from 2015) -- gave labor relations specialists their first ability to detect contract compliance anomalies at scale: software could flag patterns of possible overtime misallocation, seniority bypass, or wage-progression violations across thousands of employees automatically, rather than waiting for a grievance to surface the issue. Culture Amp's employee engagement surveys gave specialists a leading indicator of labor climate deterioration before it produced a spike in grievances or organizing activity. This shifted the specialist's work toward proactive risk management and away from purely reactive grievance defense.

  • AI legal research and contract drafting (Harvey AI, Bloomberg Law Labor AI, LexisNexis Lexis+ AI)

    Harvey AI (launched 2023), Bloomberg Law Labor AI, and LexisNexis Lexis+ AI brought large-language-model capabilities to the most labor-intensive pre-table and post-table tasks in labor relations: contract clause drafting, CBA benchmarking, arbitration brief writing, and NLRB precedent research. AlphaSense's contract intelligence tools enabled instant comparison of CBA language across thousands of publicly available agreements. HR Acuity's AI case management automated grievance categorization and step-response drafting. Microsoft 365 Copilot embedded AI drafting assistance across the Word, Outlook, and Teams workflow where specialists spend the bulk of their non-table time. Practitioners who once spent two days researching settlement comparables before a negotiation session can now do the same work in two hours. This is the most significant productivity shift in the role since web-based legal research arrived in the mid-1990s -- and it arrives as the AI-employment-impact bargaining wave (NLRB GC 25-01, January 2025; SAG-AFTRA 2023; WGA 2023; UAW Letters of Understanding 2023) is creating an entirely new premium specialty.

    Effect on the work

    AI tools compress the research, drafting, and documentation workload -- historically a large share of a typical specialist's day -- potentially allowing a single practitioner to manage a larger docket. The net employment effect is unclear: demand destruction (fewer specialists needed per employer) may be partially offset by demand creation (the AI-employment-impact bargaining specialty requires highly skilled practitioners that the existing LRS population is uniquely positioned to become).

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Labor Relations Specialists employment and pay by year

On record since1914
Latest US employment64,810 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$95,420 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+2.1% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 19 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
1926500n/aEst., IRC4HR Researched contextReport
195015,000n/aEst., A Brief Examination of Union Membership… Researched contextReport
1955n/a$5,200Est., University of Missouri Libraries Researched contextReport
197055,000n/aEst., Labor unions in the United States Researched contextReport
199078,000n/aEst., Economic Policy Institute Researched contextReport
201275,930$54,660BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201376,160$54,630BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201479,780$56,950BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
201579,330$58,820BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
201679,430$62,310BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
201778,510$63,200BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
201877,140$67,790BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
201975,580$69,020BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
202070,050$73,240BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202163,810$77,010BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202262,200$82,010BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202362,800$89,980BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202464,590$93,500BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202564,810$95,420BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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