Chart Of The Day II

Yglesias adds a few wrinkles:

Of course ups and downs in the volume of strikes can mean more than one thing. The strike spike in the 70s seems to me to have been driven primarily by real negative shocks to the economy that forced capital and labor to re-divide the surplus. Either way, the point is that significant labor action hasn’t been an important part of the experience of most people my age.

Which suggests to me that Matt may be vulnerable to misreading those generations like mine who remember all too well the power of the unions in the past. That doesn't mean some corrective may not be needed - as the relative balance of various social forces along with gobalization have made labor much more vulnerable than in the past. But the case for protecting the power of public sector unions must be made, not assumed.