Unions made 2023 the year of the strike. What will happen next?

The number of workers on strike nearly tripled this year.

Greg Iwinski, a late-night TV writer, walked off the job this year amid a dramatic surge of workers going out on strike -- and he says the trend made its presence felt at the bargaining table.

"The ammunition that a company has, whether it's an automaker or a TV studio, is telling you that a strike won't work -- your collective action won't help," Iwinski, who helped broker an agreement that delivered significant pay increases for 11,000 Hollywood writers, told ABC News.

A slew of contract breakthroughs over the course of 2023 dispelled that notion, Iwinski said. "If you hold out long enough, you will break them and win," he said.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, or AMPTP, which negotiated on behalf of the TV studios, did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment.

Iwinski was among more than 500,000 workers who went out on strike nationwide in 2023, nearly tripling the figure recorded over the same period a year earlier, according to data through the end of October from Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations shared with ABC News.