We tend to think about the decline of US unions primarily as a story of urban deindustrialization. Yet in the 1970s, rural areas actually saw four times more union elections per capita than cities did.

Rural and urban union election rates started plummeting at the same time, but the drop-off in rural areas was far steeper, with the number of rural union elections per capita falling by more than three-quarters between the late ’70s and the 2000s. The collapse of rural unions came at the same time as a broader reversal in rural America’s fortunes. After dropping throughout the ’60s and early ’70s, rural poverty rose faster than urban poverty in the ’80s and has barely come down since then.