The 2026 strike wave is the spread of American industrial action that John Kiriakou raised with the economist Richard D. Wolff in April 2026, together with a turn in the labour market.
What Kiriakou put to him
Kiriakou’s framing joined three things. February had “showed significant job losses, and that was a real reversal from previous months,” and he asked for a six-month forecast. Into that he folded “the role of the proliferation of strikes from from Minneapolis to the to the Southern California ports,” and what impact the strikes might have “on rising union membership after years and years of decline, on wages, and on an economic recovery.”[1]
The answer he got
Wolff did not treat the strikes as the starting point. His answer began with periodicity: capitalism, “wherever it has settled, has had an economic downturn, on average, every 4 to 7 years” — an average, so sometimes above and sometimes below.[2] The names change and the phenomenon does not: the dot-com crash in the spring of 2000, the subprime mortgage crash in 2008 and 2009, the Covid-19 crash in 2020. “Well, do the math. It’s 2026, we’re due.”[3]
Added to the schedule were two shocks — the tariff regime and what he called the oil energy explosion — and on that basis he expected a downturn, noting that here he agreed with the head of JP Morgan Chase, “with whom I don’t agree on anything else.” If the war resumed, “then all bets are off,” and the comparison he reached for was 1929 to 1940: eleven years, unemployment peaking at 25 per cent, six times the rate at the time of the interview.[4][5]
The strikes entered his answer at the end, as a reaction rather than a cause. Fear of the coming downturn, and the beginning of adjustment to it, was “provoking employers to squeeze the workers who are beginning, interestingly, to really fight back.”[6]