Conversation Starter: The Last Decade Was a Quiet Period for Labor Strikes

With recent and ongoing labor strikes in the auto, entertainment and healthcare industries – as well as narrowly averted strikes over the summer in the transportation and logistics industry – it can feel as if there has been a resurgence of labor actions across the United States economy.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 17,700 workers on strike in the middle of September, up sharply from 3,300 in September 2022. The data cover workers “directly involved in large strikes who were idle during the entire pay period which includes the 12th of the month” and do not yet cover the United Auto Workers strike announced on September 15th, 2023 or the Kaiser Permanente healthcare worker strike in early October 2023.

Thus far in the 2020s, there has been on average 4,700 workers on strike each month – up from an average of 2,600 per month in the 2010s, but below the monthly average of 6,800 in the 2000s and well below the average of 13,600 per month in the 1990s. We expect the October 2023 data will reflect a new high point for this decade thus far when they are released next week. Prior to that, the previous high was December 2022 when University of California workers were on strike.

Conversation Starters are a periodic series of charts and data points from Glassdoor’s Economic Research team aimed at sparking conversations on timely trends in employee satisfaction, workplace community, the future of work, and the labor market more broadly. 

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