Evidence is growing of an uptick in labor militancy across the United States. This week, ten thousand United Automobile Workers (UAW) members at John Deere began their first strike at the company since 1986, and there are several other private-sector strikes still ongoing, including two thousand nurses at a Catholic Health hospital in New York, fourteen hundred workers at Kellogg’s cereal plants across the country, eleven hundred coal miners at Warrior Met in Alabama, and four hundred twenty United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) members at Heaven Hill Distillery in Kentucky.

While these actions do not add up to a strike wave, they might if we were to add two more huge — by recent standards — impending potential strikes, one by sixty thousand International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) members in the film and television industry, another by twenty-four thousand workers at health care giant Kaiser Permanente.

Joining these private-sector strikes is a restiveness among the broader working class, one that can be discerned in data released by the Department of Labor (DOL) on Tuesday. The biggest takeaway from the DOL report is that people are quitting their jobs in record numbers, with some 4.3 million quits in August, about 2.9 percent of the country’s workforce.