How many strikes did workers launch in 2025? How many workers were involved? How many work days did these strikes cost employers? Power At Work has the answers in this exclusive blogcast.
Burnes Center for Social Change Senior Fellow Seth Harris is joined by John Kallas, the director of the Cornell ILR-University of Illinois Labor Action Tracker, to discuss the LAT's Annual Report on work stoppages in 2025. This conversation continues a Power At Work annual tradition of interviewing Professor Kallas each year when the LAT Annual Report is released. The report on work stoppages in 2025 was issued Wednesday morning, February 18, 2026.
This exclusive interview with Professor Kallas dives deeply into the LAT's data to answer pressing questions about worker activism in the United States during the first year of the second Trump presidency. Did Trump's epic union busting cause workers to shy away from using the strike weapon to press their demands at the negotiating table? Or are workers more militant in the face of anti-worker, anti-union employer and government tactics? When workers went out on strike in 2025, what were they demanding? Higher pay? Safer workplaces? An end to anti-union retaliation?
Professor Kallas has the numbers and shares his unique analysis built on five years of leading the Labor Action Tracker and a career in the labor movement and labor academia. John Kallas has worked in collective bargaining and organizing for the California Nurses Association and the Service Employees International Union. When he started the Labor Action Tracker at Cornell University’s School of Industrial & Labor Relations in 2020, he was a PhD candidate. He is now an Assistant Professor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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