About Us

Welcome to the Labor Action Tracker, a collaboration between Cornell University's ILR School and the University of Illinois' LER School. The Tracker provides a comprehensive database of strike and labor protest activity across the United States to better inform and support labor movement activists, policymakers, and scholars. Our project originated at the ILR School in late 2020 and went public on May 1, 2021, as the Cornell ILR Labor Action Tracker thanks to generous funding from the ILR School. In January 2024, the Tracker became a collaborative effort between Cornell ILR and Illinois LER and was rebranded the Labor Action Tracker. We also thank the staff of the China Labour Bulletin for inspiring and encouraging us to develop this project.

We began documenting strikes in late-2020 and labor protests in early-2021. Our database of strikes is most accurate as of 2021. We have a relatively high degree of confidence in our ability to comprehensively capture strike activity. Due to the high number of labor protests across the United States, we aim to provide a general understanding of labor protest activity rather than achieve a complete count. Please note that our map generates the total number of strike and/or labor protest locations, which is more than the total number of individual strikes and/or protests (e.g. a single strike at five locations will appear five times on our map). Information we gather is from public sources and manually inputted into our tracker. Please see our methodology document for a more detailed description of our definitions, protocols, and variables. Follow us on twitter @ILRLaborAction to keep up to date with our project!

For any questions, or to access a spreadsheet version of our project's data, please email Johnnie Kallas at jkallas@illinois.edu.