Of course, seen from France, the home of social conflict, the strike action currently underway in the United States is hardly impressive. Since the beginning of the year, just over 323,000 employees have walked off the job – a drop in the bucket for a country with 136 million workers. A revolution is not around the corner. Even so, it's been several decades since we've reached such a boiling point.

From the high-profile strike by Hollywood actors and screenwriters to nurses, hotel cleaning staff and waiters, demands are increasing. In recent weeks, under pressure from the unions, American Airlines pilots and UPS delivery workers have already won substantial pay rises. On September 14, the contracts of 150,000 employees of Ford, General Motors and Stellantis will expire. The United Auto Workers (UAW), the union for the automotive sector, has called for a work stoppage if the three manufacturers do not agree to a 32-hour week and a 46% pay rise spread over four years.

The situation is nothing like it was before 1980. Between the Second World War and the election of Ronald Reagan, between 1 and 4 million Americans went on strike every year. The tipping point came in August 1981, when the newly-elected president broke an illegal air traffic controllers' strike by firing the strikers and replacing them at short notice with military personnel. The American labor movement has never recovered from this episode. The unionization rate, which peaked in 1954 with more than a third of employees affiliated with an organization, has fallen to 10%.

As sociologists Judith Stepan-Norris and Jasmine Kerrissey note in their 2023 book, Union Booms and Busts, unfavorable legislation has risen. Right-to-work laws are in force in more than half of American states. They prohibit union agreements with employers and deprive organizations of the dues paid by employees. In addition, bankruptcy law allows a company to reorganize and cancel all agreements previously negotiated with unions. Finally, companies are increasingly turning to consulting firms to help them avoid unionization.

For decades, public opinion accepted this decline. This is no longer the case today. According to a poll published on August 30 by the Gallup Institute, 71% of Americans support the work of labor organizations, for the first time since 1965. The National Labor Relations Board is seeing a dramatic rise in company petitions calling to have a union, after the social movement recorded two high-profile successes in 2022 at Amazon and Starbucks.

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