No employer in America had more of its workers walk out last year than the University of California. Five separate stoppages, 137,000 people between them.
Every major strike in American manufacturing, across the whole country and the whole year, involved 6,200.
That is a ratio of 22:1, and the single largest of the five California stoppages was on its own 6.5 times the size of everything manufacturing managed. Whatever picture the word strike brings to mind (at least for the image it conjures up for me), the data has not looked like it for some time.
The count says one thing and the headcount says another
Twenty major strikes began in the United States between January and July this year. Last year over the same months there were twenty-one, so on the count alone 2026 looks like a continuation. The number of workers involved fell from 214,500 to 85,200.
Same number of strikes, sixty percent fewer people. The average major stoppage this year has involved about 4,300 workers against 10,200 last year.
That is worth understanding rather than filing as noise, because the strike count is not low. Twenty is the third highest January to July figure of the twenty-seven years since 2000, and last year's twenty-one ties the record. Two consecutive years near a quarter-century high in frequency, with participation in the middle of the pack.
