Labor Action Tracker 2025

Luke O’Brien, BSILR ’27, Cornell University ILR School
Deepa Kylasam Iyer, Ph.D. Candidate, Cornell University ILR School
Johnnie Kallas, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois LER School

Suggested citation: O’Brien, L., Iyer, D. K., and Kallas, J. (2026). Labor Action Tracker: Annual Report 2025. ILR School, Cornell University & LER School, University of Illinois.

Acknowledgments

A special thanks goes to the Cornell University ILR School and the University of Illinois LER School for funding our project and the entire Labor Action Tracker research team for putting in the hours to document strike activity. We would also like to thank Betsy Wiggers, Dave Yantorno, Julie Greco, Adam Allington, Jeff Amaral, and Nell Madigan for their excellent design and promotion of our report.

Introduction

While strikes shut down schools, transit, and even garbage collection, total work stoppage activity slightly decreased in 2025, though the extent of the labor movement’s response to the second Trump administration remains an ongoing question. We are pleased to announce the fifth Labor Action Tracker Annual Report, which presents key findings from our data on work stoppages in 2025.

Since funding cuts by the Reagan administration in the early-1980s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has only documented work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers that last at least an entire shift. By only recording large work stoppages, official data sources exclude the vast majority of strike activity, posing issues for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars in determining the extent of workplace conflict across the country. In this report, we follow the lead of the BLS and document work stoppages, which include both strikes and lockouts. You can follow our project and view our monthly reports of strike activity on X (formerly Twitter) @ILRLaborAction and Bluesky @laboraction.bsky.social.

Methodology

This report is based on data we collected on strikes and lockouts in 2025. Detailed information on our project’s methodology can be found here. Further details specific to the methodology for this report can be found throughout this document. We generate all our data on strikes from several public sources, including existing work stoppage databases, news articles, and social media posts. We follow rigorous verification protocols to ensure that a strike did in fact occur and to collect data on several related variables, including, but not limited to, the size, duration, industry, and demands of a strike. We link to the sources used to generate data on each strike on our site’s interactive map. We also collect data on labor protests but only provide summaries of work stoppages in this report because our count of protests is less comprehensive. In light of our rigorous protocols, we may underestimate total work stoppages as we cannot include events that do not have adequate verifiable information.

Updated 2024 Findings

While following our strike tracking protocol, we occasionally find new information on work stoppages months after they occur. We added nine additional strikes to our 2024 data, which now includes 368 work stoppages. Five of these new additional strikes stretched into 2025, and are thus included in the data of this report.

Key Findings from 2025

We documented 303 work stoppages (298 strikes and five lockouts) involving approximately 290,000 workers. These work stoppages resulted in approximately 4,150,000 strike days. 

The number of work stoppages in 2025 continued to exceed 2021 levels but were not as many as in 2022, 2023, or 2024. This marks a continued decline in the number of work stoppages since 2023. Despite a 15.6% decrease in the number of work stoppages and a 22.1% decrease in strike days from 2024 to 2025, there was only a 1% decrease in the number of workers. Data from the past five years suggest that 2023 appeared to be somewhat of an outlier in terms of the number of workers on strike and the total strike days, as there were especially large and long strikes that year. However, the number of workers on strike in 2024 and 2025 exceeded both 2021 and 2022.

Despite a decline in the number of work stoppages in the Accommodation and Food Service sector, which tend to be relatively short and small in nature, more strikes occurred in this industry than any other. This is partially the result of ongoing labor activism by workers organizing with relatively new unions, including the California Fast Food Workers Union, Union of Southern Service Workers, and Starbucks Workers United. Another notable change came from the Healthcare and Social Assistance industry, which overtook Manufacturing and Educational Services to become the second largest industry by number of work stoppages. Healthcare and Social Assistance was also the largest industry by number of workers and strike days. 

Some other trends are beginning to emerge from our data. First, pay continues to be the most common demand of striking workers, but first contract and healthcare overtook health and safety and staffing as the second and third most frequent demand. The demand for a first contract increased considerably between 2024 and 2025, going from 45 to 70, indicating ongoing activism by workers fighting for a first contract. Second, the West region accounted for 77.1% of all workers on strike in 2025, primarily due to labor activism in California. This is the third straight year that the West has accounted for approximately 60+% of total workers on strike. Finally, the share of strikes organized by nonunion workers reached the lowest levels since we began tracking work stoppages in 2021. Nonunion workers organized approximately 27.6% of all strikes between 2021-2024, including over 30% in 2021 and 2022, but just 18.5% in 2025.