Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor Highlight

During the 1970s, the labor movement had built up enough strength and influence to ensure that the mere threat of a strike was often enough to get a recalcitrant employer to back down, but post-PATCO, that power swung in the other direction. The number of large-scale strikes plummeted, declining by nearly 90 percent between 1977 and 2016; by 2020, that number had dwindled into the single digits, with only 8 strikes of more than 1,000 workers recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Comparatively, in 1970, there were 380 major strikes or lockouts, and nearly 200 in 1980, but the so-called PATCO Syndrome helped hasten that decline into mere double digits by the mid-1990s.