Work Stoppages Up 52% Last Year, More Than Any Year Between 1942 and 1980
Though the rate of union membership sits at a historic low, there are serious reasons for optimism about the state of labor in the US. For one, the historic increase in work stoppages last year.
Labor is on the rise. Amazon workers won their first union last spring, grad student workers asserted their power with the five largest union filings of 2022, and the Starbucks union posted victories in 267 elections in 365 days ending in December of last year.
Though the union membership rate declined over the course of 2022, the total number of workers in unions increased by 1.9 percent, up to 14.3 million. The total number represented by unions rose by 200,000, up to 16 million. At the same time, the Economic Policy Institute estimated, “more than 60 million workers in 2022 wanted to join a union, but couldn’t.” And public approval of unions is higher than at any point since 1965.
A resurgence seems to be in the making.
And a more recent analysis by the Cornell-ILR Labor Action Tracker provides even more reason for optimism.
Its second annual report found that work stoppages jumped 52% last year, to a total of 424 (of which 417 were strikes and seven were lockouts). That’s a major increase in labor activity, and one that becomes even more impressive when we put it in historical context. Based on my analysis, work stoppages increased by a greater percentage last year than any year between 1942 and 1980!
To come to this conclusion, I examined the recent data from Cornell-ILR’s Labor Action Tracker and historical data1 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).2
The Cornell-ILR report contains data on all work stoppages, no matter the number of employees involved. Unfortunately, as the Cornell-ILR report points out, since budget cuts in the early 1980s, the BLS has excluded from its database data on work stoppages involving fewer than 1,000 workers. So for the first couple graphs I include data only for the periods 1927-1980 and 2021-2022, using data from the BLS for the former and data from Cornell-ILR for the latter.
I first looked at the raw numbers of work stoppages each year during both periods. Those are displayed on the graph below.
These numbers don’t paint a particularly pretty picture. The absolute number of work stoppages in 2022 was lower than in any year from 1927 through 1980.
But when we look at the percentage change in labor activity each year over roughly the same period, the picture becomes more optimistic.
As the graph above reveals, the percentage change in work stoppages in 2022 registers as the fifth largest increase of the entire data set. 2022’s increase was larger than any year from 1942 through 1980. And it would have been the fifth largest increase of the period from 1928 through 1980.
Though the BLS does not include data on work stoppages involving fewer than 1,000 workers in its database, we can get a sense of how the 2022 increase fits into more recent trends by graphing the BLS’s data on major work stoppages (1,000+ workers) since 1947.
From this data, we can see that the 2022 increase in major work stoppages, which came in at 44%, is the seventh largest increase since 1947. Notably, five of the seven largest increases have occurred since the Great Recession (specifically in 2010, 2011, 2018, 2021, and 2022). And three of the seven largest increases have occurred in the last five years for which there is complete data.
It may be tempting to discount these numbers due to the historically small number of work stoppages that have occurred in recent years. But the historical data also shows that small numbers can quickly turn large. As indicated in the first graph above, a full 73% of the difference between the peak in the number of annual work stoppages in 1974 and the number at the start of the data set in 1927 was gained from 1932 through 1937. In other words, roughly three-quarters of the total increase in work stoppages between 1927 and 1974 occurred in a mere five year period.
The 52% increase in work stoppages in 2022 displayed on the second graph in fact most closely resembles the increase in 1929, just before the boom in labor activity in the 1930s. The first graph shows that the 1929 increase could have been dismissed as a blip at the time, but what followed was remarkable.
And even looking at absolute numbers, total major work stoppages last year were at the second highest level of the past two decades.
Hoping for a 1930s redux for the labor movement may be over-optimistic. But there’s good reason not to remain grim about the prospects for labor. The labor movement can make a comeback, and let’s hope it will.
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The data I use comes from the March 1982 BLS Bulletin. According to the BLS website, this data reflects “all work stoppages in the United States that involved six workers or more and continued for the equivalent of a full day or shift or longer.” The Cornell-ILR report contains information on work stoppages involving as few as two workers, so it’s slightly more comprehensive. But the methodologies for each are similar enough to warrant comparison.