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As two new data sets suggest, workers who took advantage of a tight labor market and pressured employers to improve wages and working conditions have staged an increasing number of strikes over the past year.
Figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released Wednesday show that he has joined nearly 121,000 workers in his 23 major strikes, which began in 2022. That’s his 81,000+ workers on 16 major strikes in 2021. The Secretariat defines business interruption “large” jobs as those involving at least 1,000 workers.
Meanwhile, a more detailed study by Cornell University’s Department of Industrial and Labor Relations confirmed at least 424 business stoppages of all sizes last year, a 52% increase from his 279 the year before. The strike affected at least 224,000 workers, a 60% increase from 140,000 in 2021.
Both BLS and Cornell data include lockouts. A lockout is when an employer forcibly dismisses a worker during a labor dispute, rather than the worker voluntarily resigning. But lockouts represented a small fraction of all work stoppages (only seven of his 424 that Cornell found), and all major work stoppages included in the BLS results were strikes.
“Overall, most of the staff involved in last year’s strike, he’s a whopping 60%, are in education.”
The unemployment rate has been at historically low levels over the past year, making it harder for employers to find workers and giving workers more power to demand better jobs.
But while the number of strikes has increased over the past year, workers in the United States are far fewer on strike than they were decades ago, largely thanks to the declining union presence in the economy. Workers with union protection are far more likely to quit to improve working conditions, and the number of US workers estimated at one in three in the 1950s is now in ten. Only one person is a union member.
“Although we recorded an increase in strikes and an approximate number of strike workers in 2022 compared to 2021, the level of strike activity is lower than in previous historical periods,” Cornell researchers said. I am pointing out.
Cornell said food and housing had the most strikes last year, accounting for 34% of his total work stoppages. Most of these strikes have been small and short-lived, and over the past year workers at Starbucks, who launched a historic organizing campaign with United, or joined the $15 Struggle campaign, first Any of the hood employees are involved.
Overall, most of the staff involved in last year’s strike (a whopping 60%) worked in education. These strikes tended to be larger and longer than those in the food industry. A Cornell study found that more than 135,000 education workers had been on strike for a total of 2.5 million days.
UCLA postdocs and academic researchers will march in Westwood on Dec. 1, 2022 to demand better wages, student housing, childcare and more as contract negotiations continue and thousands continue to strike.
MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images via Getty Images
The largest strike last year was at the University of California system, where 48,000 teaching assistants, graduate student researchers, postdoctoral fellows and other academic workers walked off the job for 40 days. Believed to be the largest higher-education strike in U.S. history, it ended in December with an agreement between the university and the United Auto Workers union that raised pay as much as 80% for some workers.
Cornell researchers also analyzed the stated reasons for workers going on strike, finding that the most common demands included “better pay, improved health and safety, and more staffing.” An increasing number of workers also called for an “end to anti-union retaliation” and the reinstatement of fired workers.
The Supreme Court recently heard a case that could weaken workers` ability to strike by opening unions up to lawsuits by struck employers. As HuffPost recently reported,that could make workers less likely to go on strike in the first place if they know companies might be able to pursue damages associated with the work stoppage through litigation. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-wing think tank, analyzed strike data on Wednesday and warned that decisions in favor of employers could have devastating effects on workers.
“If the Supreme Court is satisfied with this argument, it would overturn decades of jurisprudence on the right to strike and significantly reduce workers’ ability to strike,” the authors write.
Judgment in this case is expected later this year.
