About 15 highway construction projects were slowed or stopped in 1994 when an estimated 6,000 construction workers in Connecticut went on strike for 12 days.

Two years later, more than 1,000 custodial, maintenance and food service workers at Yale walked out of the job, closing dining halls and even most of the Yale University Art Gallery.

Strikes involving 1,000 workers or more, such as these, have been tracked in detail since 1993 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It considers strikes of this size major work stoppages.

And according to its monthly data, Connecticut workers have been involved in 15 work stoppages, with nine of them involving workers only from Connecticut and six where the strike was across state boundaries, ranking Connecticut second in New England for the most major strikes.

Connecticut's involvement in major strikes since 1993 falls right behind Massachusetts, whose workers were involved in 18 major strikes against places such as Raytheon, Verizon Communications and Boston public schools. Trailing them are Rhode Isand with 10 major strikes and Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont had five or fewer. The state with the most major strikes was California, whose workers were involved in 158 separate instances. The runner-up, Illinois, had 68 instances.

The most recent major strike in Connecticut was in 2019, where a strike of more than 30,000 workers from more than 200 Stop & Shop stores across Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts cost the company over $100 million.

Another case involved Coca-Cola bottle and distribution factories in Connecticut and California, where almost 2,000 workers walked out the job.

Other places whose workers went on major strikes in Connecticut are AT&T, Sikorsky, General Electric, Pratt & Whitney and nursing homes in the state.