Shortly before midnight on Wednesday, production workers at a John Deere facility in Waterloo, Iowa, started shutting down the plant, quenching the furnaces in the foundry.

The plant was already mostly empty, with Deere telling overnight workers to stay home.

The 10,000 workers who walked off the job are striking Deere for the first time in 35 years.

They join 2,000 hospital workers striking in Buffalo, New York; 1,400 production workers for Kellogg’s in four states; 450 steelworkers in Huntington, West Virginia; and a one-day walk-off of 2,000 telecommunications workers in California, all since October 1. One thousand Alabama coal miners, 700 nurses in Massachusetts, 400 whiskeymakers in Kentucky, and 200 bus drivers in Reno, Nevada, were already on strike, in addition to recently settled strikes by 2,000 carpenters in Washington, 600 Frito-Lay workers in Kansas, and 1,000 Nabisco factory workers at five plants across the country.

workers went on strike in the space of a year.

But it isn’t the labor lull of the 2010s, either, when large strike activity in the private sector fell toward zero.

May who benefit from the same low-wage labor market.

But that tight labor market, a problem from the perspective of employers, has a mirror image in the eyes of those workers who never left the workplace — the “essential” and “front-line” and “hero” workers.

As Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union Local 3G president and Kellogg’s strike leader Trevor Bidelman told Labor Notes, “The future’s not for sale.”.

In the case of Deere, workers are well aware of the company’s record profits and aren’t moved by what amounts to a $1-per-hour wage increase for most of them.

Long thread, but important: John Deere workers have reached out to me frustrated about media repeating company talking points that workers make 60-70k a year.

So let’s talk about wages at John Deere.

But a tight labor market also means leverage for workers.

Knowing that they’re harder to replace, individual workers become more likely to say no to bosses: Today, workers are quitting their jobs at the highest rate in decades — one of the most precise measures of their labor market power as individuals.

In the 1945-1946 cycle, when more than 10 percent of American workers went on strike, events that could plausibly be called general strikes erupted in Stamford, Connecticut; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Rochester, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Oakland, California.

But unemployment finally fell below 4 percent in 2018, and that year and the next, a noticeable uptick in strike activity occurred — most notably in a massive teachers’ strike wave — when labor markets had finally recovered from the devastation that followed the 2008 financial crisis, but teachers’ wages had not.

A major strike like the one at UPS in 1997 or Verizon in 2016 won gains for workers, but such events remained economic affairs.

Those caught in the middle, like salaried employees at Deere, may largely sympathize with the strikers while being forced to work through the strike despite a serious skills gap.

John Deere is trying to break a strike by having salaried office workers operate heavy machinery, let’s see how that’s going— pic.twitter.com/Yb1JkoFAH8.

But when asked to take sides, he’s stuck to official neutrality, his press secretary citing unspecified “legal reasons.” On Friday, when asked about the John Deere strike, he stated, obviously, “They have a right to strike

And the administration has allowed key pro-worker provisions in the American Rescue Plan Act to expire, such as subsidies for COBRA, which are particularly crucial for striking workers whose employers cut off health insurance

workers, part of the United Steelworkers union, who struck for five months this year had the benefit of federally subsidized COBRA; the UAW members currently striking John Deere, whose employer plans to cut them off their plans by October 27, will not

Ultimately, the issue in dispute across these strikes is whether American workers can be muscled back into the punishing labor market conditions of the pandemic and the several decades that preceded Covid-19 that made the pandemic so brutal within the insecure and unequal American workplace