Labor strikes are seldom anything if not controversial, with supporters claiming they’re an essential part of ensuring a good deal for workers, while opponents argue that they’re holding employers and customers to ransom. Regardless, you can’t argue that they are often effective in securing a better deal for workers.

Research from Cornell suggests that the most effective form of industrial action is a so-called “fixed-duration strike”, with these found to impose the biggest financial and reputational costs on employers. What’s more, such confrontational tactics were also effective at boosting employee power.

The article highlights the rise of a more militant form of leadership within the California Nurses Association in the mid-1990s, during which time strikes became more strategically deployed. The author examined 10 strikes of fixed duration by the Association between 2011 and 2015, with the majority of the strikes scheduled for a single day.

Fixed duration

The paper suggests that the fixed-duration strikes helped to ensure the membership was more militant with a much stronger social justice vision. They also helped to resist around 100 concessions that were proposed by the employer at the bargaining table, with the author arguing that they were central to securing larger wage gains for members.

“The fixed-duration strike is a crucial component of labor revitalization and the union’s strategy to resist both individual hospital employers and the broader private health care system in the United States,” the author explains.

The paper suggests that unions and other labor organizations across the United States are increasingly retooling strike action in order to confront what they regard as growing employer power. The author runs the ILR Labor Action Tracker, which monitors industrial action across the US. The tracker recorded 545 industrial actions across 803 locations from January to September 2022. The data suggests there has been a surge in actions over the past four years, although the number still pales in comparison with the 1980s.

Fixed-duration strikes are particularly harmful to employers, both in economic and reputational terms. The paper highlights, for instance, that a hospital that was impacted by a nurses strike was unable to shut down and forced to bring in temporary nurses, who charged high fees. The unionized nurses then returned to work again after the strike.

Such strikes are no guarantee of a resolution, however, but the author insists that they remain a highly effective tool to, in his words, protect the economic interests of nurses.