The Strike: Snatching Victory from the Jaws of Defeat

Abstract

an average of 304 large strikes, involving more than 1.4 million workers, each year. But after Reagan signaled open season on union-busting, the plunge in strikes was stag-gering. In just ten years after PATCO, the number of annual strikes fell by 71 percent, to just eighty-seven strikes a year, involving on average 446,000 workers. In the final decade of the twentieth century, there was an average of merely thirty-four strikes, involving less than 300,000 workers, per year. And from 2010 to 2022, there have been only fifteen strikes each year, involving 131,000 workers on average. 2