ILPC 2026

In recent decades, a marked decline in the frequency of strikes across the advanced capitalist world has led some scholars to announce the death of the strike.  Yet, even as economic strikes by established trade unions have declined, new types of unconventional strikes have emerged in unorganized sectors in the United States, along with a surge in political strikes in Europe, and a wave of militant strikes across the global South.  The complexity of these events requires a rethinking of the strike beyond traditional theory.  In this paper, we trace the intellectual tradition of strike theory in the U.S. from economic bargaining models to institutionalist critiques to social movement theories. Building on the work of Beverly Silver and Jennifer Chun, we then propose an alternative approach. We argue that strikes can be better understood in terms of a multidimensional view of power in the employment relationship, including three interrelated forms of worker power: structural, associational, and symbolic. The balance of these relations of power in any industry or juncture is shaped by paths of development in the economy, state and civil society. These dimensions affect how we understand not only traditional measures of strike activity but what strikes are in the contemporary period.  We demonstrate the utility of our approach here via an analysis of recent unconventional strikes in the “Fight for $15” campaign in the US.