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Strike action
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==Frequency and duration== [[File:Women Picket during Ladies Tailors Strike, 02-1910 (11192045794).jpg|thumb|Female tailors on strike, New York City, February 1910]] Strikes are rare, in part because many workers are not covered by a [[collective bargaining agreement]].<ref name=Kennan>John Kennan, [https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jkennan/research/Strikes.Palgrave.pdf Strikes] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200807204111/https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jkennan/research/Strikes.Palgrave.pdf |date=7 August 2020 }}, National Bureau of Economic Research.</ref> Strikes that do occur are generally fairly short in duration.<ref name=Kennan/> Labor economist John Kennan notes: {{blockquote|In Britain in 1926 (the year of [[1926 United Kingdom general strike|the general strike]]) about 9 workdays per worker were lost due to strikes. In 1979, the loss due to strikes was a little more than one day per worker. These are the extreme cases. In the 79 years following 1926, the number of workdays lost in Britain was less than 2 hours per year per worker. In the U.S., idleness due to strikes never exceeded one half of one percent of total working days in any year during the period 1948-2005; the average loss was 0.1% per year. Similarly, in Canada over the period 1980-2005, the annual number of work days lost due to strikes never exceeded one day per worker; on average over this period lost worktime due to strikes was about one-third of a day per worker. Although the data are not readily available for a broad sample of developed countries, the pattern described above seems quite general: days lost due to strikes amount to only a fraction of a day per worker per annum, on average, exceeding one day only in a few exceptional years.<ref name=Kennan/>}} Since the 1990s, strike actions have generally further declined, a phenomenon that might be attributable to lower information costs (and thus more readily available access to information on [[economic rent]]s) made possible by computerization and rising personal indebtedness, which increases the cost of job loss for striking workers.<ref name=Kennan/><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Gouzoulis |first=Giorgos |date=January 2023 |title=What do indebted employees do? Financialisation and the decline of industrial action |url=https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/irj.12391 |journal=Industrial Relations Journal |language=en |volume=54 |issue=1 |pages=71β94 |doi=10.1111/irj.12391 |s2cid=255675554 |issn=0019-8692|hdl=1983/7ec29ae7-0441-47f7-856f-c68013308c9b |hdl-access=free }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Gouzoulis |first=Giorgos |title=Strikes: how rising household debt could slow industrial action this year |url=http://theconversation.com/strikes-how-rising-household-debt-could-slow-industrial-action-this-year-198466 |access-date=2023-01-27 |website=The Conversation |date=25 January 2023 |language=en}}</ref> In the United States, the number of workers involved in major work stoppages (including strikes and, less commonly, lockouts) that involved at least a thousand workers for at least one full shift generally declined from 1973 to 2017 (coinciding with a general decrease in overall union membership), before substantially increasing in 2018 and 2019.<ref name=":0">Heidi Shierholz & Margaret Poydock, [https://www.epi.org/publication/continued-surge-in-strike-activity/ Report: Continued surge in strike activity signals worker dissatisfaction with wage growth] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200526081319/https://www.epi.org/publication/continued-surge-in-strike-activity/ |date=26 May 2020 }}, Economic Policy Institute (11 February 2020).</ref> In the 2018 and 2019 period, 3.1% of union members were involved in a work stoppage each year on average, these strikes also contained more workers than ever recorded with an average of 20,000 workers participating in each major work stoppage in 2018 and 2019.<ref name=":0" /> ===By country=== For the period from 1996 to 2000, the ten countries with the most strike action (measured by average number of days not worked for every 1000 employees) were as follows:<ref>{{cite web |title=Countries Compared by Labor > Strikes. International Statistics at NationMaster.com |url=https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Labor/Strikes |website=www.nationmaster.com |access-date=22 August 2022}}</ref> {| class="wikitable" ! Country ! Days not worked |- | Denmark | 296 |- | Iceland | 244 |- | Canada | 217 |- | Spain | 189 |- | Norway | 135 |- | South Korea | 95 |- | Ireland | 90 |- | Australia | 86 |- | Italy | 76 |- | France | 67 |}
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