The resurgence of strike action in many major Western economies has been in the news over the last few months. Last November Neil Bradley, the executive vice president of the US Chamber of Commerce, stated explicitly on Fox News that “We cannot allow a national rail strike to occur.” The fact that a national rail strike was even rumored to be on the horizon was a sign of changing times.

But while strikes are indeed making a comeback in both the United States and the United Kingdom, analysts tend to overestimate the pace and strength of the current waves of industrial action. Unfortunately, their optimism overlooks how far we are from the actual peak of strike action of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In order to revive workplace democracy, we need to understand why strike mobilization is a much harder task than it used to be — that is, what disincentivizes workers from supporting industrial action. In my recent article published in the Industrial Relations Journal, I explore which economic and political factors are associated with the steep decline in strike activity. My work focuses on strike duration, participation, and the number of strikes that took place in the United States, the UK, Japan, Korea, Sweden, and Norway from 1970 to 2018.