Employee activism & complaints are on the rise. It’s no longer a rare event for companies and organizations to deal with. Employee activism is here to stay and it’s redefining how companies and organizations approach employee relations and labor relations in today’s workplace environment.
From walkouts at Starbucks and Amazon to strikes in the public sector and accountability demands due to climate damage, workers are getting together to collectively demand changes in corporate policies and political representatives are siding with workers, as we recently saw it with the New York new elect City Mayor, Zohran Mamdani and the Senator Bernie Sanders joining Starbucks workers to discuss the workers’ rights and demands.
But how and where is this trend coming from? Let’s talk about the data.
The Rise of Employee Activism & Complaints
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. has seen an employee activism comeback since 2022, including unionization efforts at global and national companies, such as Amazon, Starbucks, Chipotle and more. This movement is mostly driven by younger generations that are growing more empowered and purpose-driven driven like Gen Z and Millennials.
There’s no difference for Canada, which, according to Statistics Canada and confirmed by the Conference Board of Canada, 2023 had the highest number of days lost, amounting to 6.6 million due to labor disputes since 1986. While 2024 lost days decreased to 2.3 million, the trend keeps rising.
The Global perspective follows the trend. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, 61% of the respondents express deep institutional grievance and 40% of the young workers respondents approve of hostile activism as a legitimate way to drive change.
With politicians joining forces and increasing visibility to the workers’ fights, just as Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders did with the striking Starbucks workers last December 1, 2025, it all points to a new era for employee activism & complaints that companies, organizations and HR managers need to be ready for.
Employee Activism Drivers
This employee activism & complaints are not coming out of nowhere. It is driven by different reasons as a result of the rising power imbalances:
- Emergent crisis: Job insecurity, economic pressure and rising living costs are activating a recalibration of what employees expect from employers: not just pay but dignity, respect, transparency and safety.
- Voice inequity: Employees don’t feel represented in decisions that affect their work and life and face unmet fairness expectations. According to different research, nearly half of non-unionized U.S. workers say they want more influence over pay and promotions with an interest in unionized structures.
- Generational value shift: Younger workers not only demand justice, work safety and ethics. They’re also unafraid to speak up against corporations. A Weber Shandwick survey found that 75% of employees believe that speaking out about their employer is justified when values are misaligned.
- Structural evolution: The dream job is no longer represented by a full-time career, but rather a remote one that supports a more balanced lifestyle, with higher expectations from employers.
- Digital amplification: Social media has made activism reachable for everyone as a resourceful way to be heard, find support and make changes in their workplace. It enables quicker coordination that can speak to millions within hours.
- Escalating social expectations: Environmental, Social and Governance framework demands are higher for companies as workers demand consistency between corporate sustainability pledges and actual practices.
Implications for HR Leaders and Employers
Employee activism & complaints impact more than just a company’s reputation. It can lower employees’ morale, which affects retention rates, jeopardize operational continuity and lead to costly lawsuits and grievances. HR leaders need to have formal channels to manage employee grievances to avoid employee activism & complaints. The question is how organizations can respond to this when formal channels fail.
Employee activism can look different depending on the industry. The public sector’s employee activism is driven mostly due to Return-to-Work (RTW) and Return-to-Office (RTO) mandates and compensation disputes. For retail and tech, the focus is more on wage equity and automation fears.
When we look at manufacturing and construction, employee activism is mostly motivated by safety concerns. Healthcare and higher education, on the other hand, face speech restrictions that have intensified employee activism. Finally, banking and professional services are pressured to take stands on global issues that align with their values.
To avoid escalations and prevent employee activism & complaints, HR managers need to be consistent and standardize processes to manage employee complaints, enforce policies according to collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) and follow industry best practices.
Without a unified system like Sodales for health, safety, employee relations and labor relations compliances, these tasks are not only time-consuming, but they also increase the risk for gap compliance.
From discontent detection and employees’ mobilization to escalation and resolution, HR managers need to identify and understand the trends and have audit-ready data to comply with different standards and regulations to avoid most common challenges while managing employee activism:
- No visibility to trends before they become risks: Without a platform with a unified data foundation to collect metrics across health and safety, employee relations and labor relations compliances, HR managers cannot identify trends, especially if the information is scattered across different channels, like paper, documents, spreadsheets, voice messages, etc.
Multiple complaints about the same issue can go unnoticed when data lives in silos. The patterns were there, but HR missed all the flags due to lack of visibility to key data.
Sodales fix this with one single data model that connects all compliances across health, safety, employee relations and labor relations. Also, the system supports reports that allow early detection of risky trends to put hands in the matter before they escalate. HR managers stop guessing and start acting according to the data.
- Inconsistency across processes: Many activisms get triggered from ambiguous policies. It can start with an employee’s complaint, but it escalates due to the lack of standardization and a digital system to handle the process properly, according to CBAs’ policies and industry best practices.
Sodales’ Grievances, Arbitration, Time Claims & CBA Management empowers HR managers to simplify complex grievances and CBAs across multiple unions to track and resolve individual, group and policy grievances with consistency, preventing unnecessary escalations. With automated workflows that trigger notifications and involve all relevant stakeholders, HR managers can ensure consistency and accuracy.
- Real-time compliance: This means that HR leaders need to stay ahead of complex, constantly changing regulations. Either OSHA reporting, multi-union CBA timelines alignment or national and local rules adaptation, including recent updates from the NLRB; this task becomes an administrative burden that consumes most of the HR managers, when they could instead focus on more strategic activities.
Sodales automates most of the work of regulatory tracking with industry processes built on, including OSHA reporting and multi-union CBA timelines, ensuring consistent adherence to updates and reducing exposure during investigations or union challenges while supporting cross-functional collaboration with different stakeholders across the process, such as legal, investigators, compliance, etc.
- Structure dialogue channels without suppression: With younger generations joining the workforce and facing limited formal channels to demand that companies act on issues that matter to them, such as ethical workplace practices or mental health, HR leaders are challenged to forcefully listen to them with employee activism, just like the strike from NYC Starbucks workers highlighting unfair labor practices.
Sodales Employee Relations Complaint Management provides a channel for employees to bring their concerns and to HR teams a unified and structured process to manage employee complaints fairly and in compliance with organizational policies and legal requirements. This way, HR managers can proactively listen and act on employees’ complaints before they escalate.
Managing Employee Activism Goes Beyond Prevention
HR leaders need to understand that managing employee activism & complaints isn’t just about preventing discomfort, but rather about providing a safe channel where employees’ concerns can be heard, properly addressed and resolved before they escalate. This means that HR leaders are challenged to:
- Monitor leading indicators like job accommodation denial rates or employee complaints on the same issue, for example.
- Integrate health and safety, employee relations and labor relations data into a single operational view.
- Align HR with legal, operations, compliance and communications in the early stages of employee activism, since this is a governance issue, not just for HR.
However, most companies and organizations don’t move from the first stage of employee activism, which is detecting discontent. HR leaders may not notice a sentiment shift if they manage employee complaints and grievances as if they were isolated events. Because they lack a system to detect the early signals of employee activism, that could be rising EHS complaints, job accommodation disputes or spikes in anonymous feedback, by the time activism goes public, it is because trust has already been lost.
Sodales collects real-time data across health, safety, labor relations and employee relations to interconnect the leading and lagging compliances under one system. This helps to better understand what leading compliances led to the grievance. It could be:
- Safety incidents
- Disability claims
- Inspections outcomes
- Employee complaints
- Applied disciplines
- Identified risks and hazards
- And more…
Once a complaint or grievance is filed, Sodales platform links the information coming from the leading compliances to the lagging compliances, which are processes that get triggered after the grievance or complaint, such as:
- More inspections and audits
- New employee complaints
- Policies to enforce discipline
- Recent risks and hazards identification
- Training to avoid grievances or safety incidents
This structured, data-driven approach helps HR, legal, operations and compliance teams to be aligned and manage employee activism across all stages with consistency and compliance.
The Wake-Up Call for Companies
Employee Activism is on the rise and it looks like it has come to stay for a while. The recent video featuring Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders at a Starbucks strike in Brooklyn is not just a symbol for workers; it’s a wake-up call for companies. It highlights amplified pressure from workers and communities when evaluating their employers according to standards of fairness. It’s also a reminder that labor issues can be politically mobilized, intensifying reputational risk, legal battles and operational disruption.
Employee activism reflects shifts in work expectations and power and suppressing it is not a wise option. It is critical for companies to have a platform that connects all compliances across health, safety, employee relations and labor relations to support transparent and fair procedures aligned with complex regulations. Sodales is the only platform that connects all these compliances to detect early signs of employee activism.
Book a demo now and learn how Sodales empowers HR leaders to proactively detect and resolve employee complaints, grievances and claims before they escalate into employee activism.
