Major strikes in 2023 set 20-year record, Labor Department says

American workers led 33 major strikes in 2023, the most in more than two decades, the Labor Department reported Wednesday, as a booming labor market fueled a strong year of activity for unions.

In total, 458,900 workers participated in major strikes, defined as involving 1,000 or more workers, according to the Labor Department. That’s more than three times the number of workers as in 2022, according to the agency’s data, which excludes a lot of strikes at smaller workplaces.

Last year the economy experienced the largest number of major strikes since 2000, when Hollywood actors and Verizon workers staged massive work stoppages.

Major strikes in 2023 included the high-profile Hollywood actors and screenwriters strikes that paralyzed the entertainment industry for months; the first-ever simultaneous work stoppage against all Big Three Detroit automakers; and one of the largest strikes by health-care workers in U.S. history. These work stoppages resulted in historic wage gains and new protections related to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and electric vehicles.

A strong labor market, fueled by pent-up consumer demand coming out of the pandemic, has given unions leverage to make more demands of employers desperate to hold on to workers.

But labor unrest, experts say, reflects a backlash after workers endured riskier working conditions during the pandemic and put up with years of relatively stagnant wages as corporate profits, stock buybacks and executive compensation soared. CEO pay at the Big Three automakers, where workers struck, rose by 40 percent compared with 6 percent for workers in the four years leading up to the strike, according to union officials.

The autoworkers strike led to 25 percent wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments to wages to offset inflation, and the right to strike over plant closures, among many other benefits. Near the end of the strike, Ford said it had suffered losses of about $1.3 billion.

Still, last year’s elevated strike numbers underestimate the impact of strikes in 2023, because they happened at smaller workplaces that the Labor Department does not track, including Starbucks stores and Walgreens pharmacies. The Labor Action Tracker, a database of all work stoppages, large and small, compiled by Cornell University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers, identified 466 strikes and four lockouts in 2023 involving about 539,000 workers.

Despite labor’s momentum, recent strike activity is far less active than during the 1940s and 1950s, when millions of workers regularly walked off the job each year, despite a smaller labor market. In 1952, workers participated in 470 major strikes, the most of any year on record, according to the Labor Department.

Strike activity has fallen steeply along with the decline of union membership across the United States, which fell to an all-time low in 2023 to 10 percent. In the 1950s, roughly 1 in 3 Americans belonged to a union.

Declining union membership - as well as strike activity - has been attributed to factors such as the offshoring of jobs, the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy and employer opposition to unions.