Welders, firefighters, equipment operators, and other employees of Marathon Petroleum in Detroit, Michigan, walked out on the job for the first time in three decades to demand higher wages and better hours at the state’s only oil refinery. Workers are currently expected to staff four consecutive 12-hour day shifts, take four days off, then do four consecutive 12-hour night shifts.

• Employer: Marathon Petroleum

• Union: Teamsters Local 283

• Strike length: Ongoing

• : Number of workers: 273

After a daylong strike, Honolulu nurses endured a 22-day-long lockout — the first in 22 years in Hawaii — as management resisted their demands for safer staffing practices. But the hospital was forced to negotiate under enormous public pressure following the arrest of peaceful demonstrators on September 23, and on October 1 it became the first hospital in Hawaii to address nurse-to-patient staffing ratios in a tentative agreement.