Go ahead and strike! The Spritzler Report shalln't take you back. You'll never work in this City again. I'll ruin you. Strike that (bad pun), you'll never work in the United States. You think I'm kidding!
Stoppage time
While robots have been rising up, American workers have been increasingly downing tools this year: strikes and lockouts have blighted multiple major industries, with several high-profile wins for trade unions commanding, among other stipulations, protection from AI, better benefits, and bigger pay packets.
The unions strike back
Even though private sector union membership has been plummeting for decades, with just 6% of American workers belonging to an organized group last year, data from the Labor Department reveals that October 2023 saw more days lost to work stoppages than any single month since the early 1980s.
The 4.4 million days lost to stoppages in October alone — calculated using the number of workers involved in strikes/lockouts multiplied by the total workdays that each stoppage stretched over — added to an already massive year for striking in the US, totaling ~17 million lost workdays as of November. Even Hollywood didn’t escape strike fever: the 4-month-long WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes, the first joint writers-and-actors strike in 60 years and the longest actors’ strike in history, was estimated to have cost California’s economy almost $5bn.
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