Wednesday, February 23, 2011

"The Decline of the Strike"

Number of strikes involving 1,000 or more workers since 1947.

Look at that chart. You have to hand it to Prechter. Strikes have been declining along an exponential decay curve since the end of the Great Depression, and the decline was especially steep during the most recent three decades of mania.

2 comments:

whydibuy said...

Strikes are only effective when they have a captive employer. Gov workers, airlines, railroads and utilities are examples of captive employers.

But get outside that protective zone and workers really are powerless to combat global forces. Even UAW guys realize a strike only weakens them as they give a upper hand to foreign makers. Add in consumers who don't give a crap about country or origin and you get the demise of the strike.

Strike all you want at clothes factories, consumers will just get some foreign duds.

CP said...

Don't you think it has more to do with complacency caused by rising social mood?

A more general graph of all protests would probably show a similar trend and could not be explained by the captive employer hypothesis.