“NEARLY half a million workers sacrificed the comforts of today for the progress of tomorrow. These strike statistics represent nothing less than a sea change in America,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said after the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its strike figures for 2019.

“Working people — completely fed up with an economic and political system that does not work for us — are turning to each other and using every tool at our disposal to win a better deal. Because of the courage of every worker who said enough is enough, we all stand on a stronger foundation today. Solidarity works. And we’re just getting started,” he continued.

The BLS said there were 25 work stoppages last year, compared to a yearly average of 15 in the decade before. In those 25 cases, bosses forced 425,500 workers to walk — just below the 485,200 who were forced to strike in 2018, but in fewer stoppages (20). In 2019, workers lost 3.244 million days off the job, or 0.01 per cent of all work time, the same share as in 2018.

The longest 2019 strike was when General Motors’ CEO Mary Parra forced 46,000 United Auto Workers to walk for 49 days — costing her 1.34 million workdays in total.

Teachers and support staffers were 63 per cent of last year’s strikers, BLS said. They had to hike off the job when cities and states — such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Denver — wouldn’t remedy lousy conditions, low pay for support staff, ageing books and lack of funding for public schools.

Teachers and staffers also accounted for the largest strikes of the last two years — interestingly, those strikes involved teachers in so-called “right-to-work” states, including one, North Carolina, that legally bars public union strikes of all kinds.

Some 123,000 North Carolina Association of Educators workers had to strike against the stinginess of the heavily GOP (Republican) state legislature in 2018, followed by 92,700 last year. And the Arizona Education Association’s “#RedforEd” walkout, with enormous community support, made national headlines when 81,000 of its members had to strike from April 26-May 3, 2018.

It also forced the GOP governor and legislature to provide more funds for the schools.

While the GM strike lasted 49 days and involved tens of thousands of workers, it — and other stoppages involving more than 1,000 workers each — was much smaller, combined, than cases of management forcing workers to strike before 1981, historical BLS data show.

The peak year for strikes was 1952, with 470 stoppagess that saw 2.75 million workers out for a combined 48.82 million workdays — that’s 0.38 per cent of all working time that year.

In terms of length, frequency and number of workers, such strikes sharply declined after 1981. Not coincidentally, GOP President Ronald Reagan arbitrarily fired the nation’s 14,000 air traffic controllers that year. The controllers, members of PATCO, were forced to strike for safety reasons.

Reagan permanently replaced all of them — and private-sector bosses saw his success against the union as a signal for “open season” on workers and strikers ever since. Large strikes hit their nadir in 2009, the first full year of the recession: five strikes, involving 12,500 workers for only a combined 124,100 days.