Why Some Strikes Last Longer: The Resilience Paradox of Partially Functional Institutions

RESUMO

Labor strikes do not necessarily lead to complete institutional disruption, particularly when non-striking sectors maintain part of normal activities. We propose a minimal dynamical model to investigate how such residual activity affects the persistence of labor conflicts. The model couples strike participation, institutional response, and overall functionality through two competing mechanisms: a direct suppressive effect of residual activity on strike participation and an indirect effect arising from the reduced institutional pressure to resolve the conflict. Analytical calculations reveal a counterintuitive regime in which increasing residual activity increases, rather than decreases, stationary strike participation. We characterize this behavior through a strike-response susceptibility and derive an exact compensation threshold separating the conventional regime from a resilience-paradox regime. At the threshold, the two mechanisms exactly balance, making stationary strike participation independent of residual activity. Numerical results confirm the analytical predictions and illustrate the underlying mechanism. Our results show that institutional resilience can have an unintended dynamical consequence: by absorbing part of the disruption generated by a strike, continued operation may reduce the urgency of institutional response and thereby favor conflict persistence. This provides a simple example of how individually stabilizing processes can collectively generate counterintuitive outcomes in complex social systems.