Since February 2018, the country has seen a wave of strikes in public education, with major work stoppages in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Oakland, and shorter strikes in Louisiana, Washington, Kentucky, North Carolina, Colorado, and Virginia.

Though the biggest strikes were in public primary and secondary education, a number of higher education workers also went on strike, including at Columbia, the New School, Wright State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and across some of the largest campuses of the University of California system. Meanwhile, after working without a contract since July, faculty at Rutgers, the largest public university in New Jersey, are currently conducting a strike authorization vote.

What about New York, of the largest states in the country, and the state with the second highest density of union members? While there were two important private sector strikes in New York — Columbia and the New School — there seemed to be no danger of the public education sector strike wave crashing there. At first glance, this seems even more odd given that several of the country’s largest, oldest, and most powerful local unions in the education sector are in New York.