When some 33,000 Boeing machinists walked out of their airplane assembly factories in Seattle in September 2024, it was one of the largest strikes of the year. But it was also just one labor action that contributed to more than 5 million strike days across the country. Though the labor movement’s wave of landmark strikes ebbed slightly compared to 2023, there was still a surge of action in 2024 that resulted in 359 work stoppages, involving more than 290,000 workers.
Thoe numbers come from the ILR-LER Labor Action Tracker, a joint project involving labor researchers at both Cornell University and the University of Illinois. That project began tracking strikes in late 2020 and into 2021, cataloging how the labor movement has gained traction since the pandemic. Last year, the tracker’s report on 2023 highlighted a significant boom: 539,000 workers who went on strike that year—a 141% increase compared to 2022—and were involved in 470 work stoppages, totaling a whopping 24,874,522 days of strikes.
[Image: courtesy Cornell University/University of Illinois]
That high was buoyed by landmark actions like the United Auto Workers Stand up strikes, the Hollywood writers and actors strikes, and multiple strikes by Starbucks workers. The number of strikes, workers involved in strikes, and total strike days did drop in 2024 compared to 2023—but are still higher than in 2021, the year that kicked off a resurgence in labor action.
The main reason for that decline, researchers say, is the drop in the number of strikes by Starbucks Workers United, which held multiple actions across hundreds of stores in both 2022 and 2023. There also weren’t as many large unions with contracts expiring in 2024 as in 2023, noted Johnnie Kallas, a labor professor who first launched the tracker. When a union’s contract expires and it bargains its next contract, that’s often when workers strike to win improvements like better pay and benefits.
[Image: courtesy Cornell University/University of Illinois]
But workers are still striking to improve their wages and working conditions, Kallas notes. In 2024, the top three demands from workers on strike were better pay, improved health and safety, and increased staffing. That’s held true over the last two years, per the report. But new in 2024 was the fact that the majority of striking workers, 32.7%, were from the education sector—thanks to large strikes by union members at California State University, University of California, and University of California Health. The manufacturing sector was responsible for the highest number of strike days, claiming 40%.
How the labor movement will keep up momentum under President Trump is unclear. The Trump administration has already threatened workers rights by gutting the National Labor Relations Board—hobbling its ability to decide any cases. (This move also makes it harder for unionized workers to get a first contract.) It also outlined how it plans to roll back Biden-era protections, like by reversing the NLRB’s decision to ban captive audience meetings, which allow an employer to force workers to listen to arguments against joining a union.
[Image: courtesy Cornell University/University of Illinois]
Though Trump’s pick to head the Labor Department, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, has some union support, it’s not clear if she’ll be able to uphold her reputation in an administration that has fired thousands of federal workers, closely aligned itself with anti-union Elon Musk, and is already planning to roll back worker protections. But Kallas says workers may not give in so easily. “It is certainly difficult to predict what the impact of the Trump administration will be with regards to strike rates,” he says, “but workers may increasingly resort to taking action into their own hands due to the further erosion of the NLRB and other legal institutions.”
