The USA: Renaissance of Strike Forms of Struggle for Workers’ Rights

The noticeable increase in both the number of strikers and the number of strikes in the United States, which have covered all American regions, is explained by complex dialectical relationships between the processes of globalization and deglobalization, in which trends towards deglobalization of the American economy are beginning to have an increasing impact on the forms of relations between labor and capital. Deglobalization can be interpreted as a reversal of trends in the socio-economic and political development of the American society that have formed over the course of 20–25 years since the early 1990s. The reverse nature of socio-economic processes in the United States means the revival of many traditional types of contradictions between labor and capital. These contradictions are characteristic of the period in which the main factor of economic growth and development was the national economy and which were pushed to the periphery of the relations between labor and capital by globalization processes. It should also be borne in mind the influence of factors of scientific and technological progress, in particular the development of artificial intelligence, and demographic shifts, in particular, the colossal influx of illegal immigrants in the period 2021–2023, in American society, which manifest themselves to a certain extent autonomously in relation to both to globalization and deglobalization. The most important driving force behind deglobalization in the United States is the coronavirus pandemic, which aggravated the relations between the social lower classes and the social upper classes in America. The main demands of striking American workers such as increasing wages and salaries, expanding the package of social services, mainly medical, and streamlining the personnel of firms and enterprises by managers also appear in the form of «timeless demands» of the labor factor to the capital factor, which have always been present in history strike movement in the United States since the 1880s. However, currently the epicenter of strikes is not the manufacturing, but the service sector, that is – information, education, trade, healthcare sector. And it is also a sign of the growing importance of the national economy. The increasing role and significance of the strike movement in the United States in recent years is a symptom of a general worsening of the relationship between labor and capital in the context of the growing political polarization of the American society that stems from the increasing confrontational nature of the opposition between the champions of liberal neo-globalism and conservative anti-globalists.

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