Tracking Worker Militancy with the Labor Action Tracker

High-profile strikes and protests have recently garnered national attention. Yet, are worker actions increasing? If so, what demands are being made and how can we understand their effectiveness? In 2021, researchers at Cornell's School of Industrial Labor Relations sought to provide the answers to these questions through the Labor Action Tracker.

The Labor Action Tracker, a collaboration between Cornell University's ILR School and the University of Illinois' LER School, is a comprehensive database of strike and labor protest activity across the United States, which can be used to better inform and support labor movement activists, policymakers, and scholars about current labor actions and conditions. The Labor Action Tracker can zero in on actions by industry, geography, duration, worker demands, and action authorization, among other things. This rich dataset provides a window into what is currently happening across the labor movement in the United States and is building a dataset that can see long-term trends.

Please join the Center for Applied Research on Work in conversation with the Labor Action Tracker project leads as they discuss the tool's genesis, how to use it, how it compares to other labor action trackers around the world, and what they are seeing in the data.

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