No, Workers Aren’t Striking Because of Vaccine Mandates

There’s a meme traveling around conservative media that vaccine mandates are the cause of the ongoing strike wave. Although you certainly can find news stories here and there about someone quitting due to a vaccine mandate or a small-scale labor protest (such as a slowdown or sickout) due to the vaccine mandate, it is clearly not the case that opposition to the vaccine mandate is driving the much bigger labor market developments.

The real driver is labor market tightness.

Quits

Quit rates and levels tend to move in lockstep with...