When strike fails: The role of personal significance and positive expectations in maintaining a commitment to worker protests

In the current paper, we address psychological mechanisms predicting commitment to collective action for labor rights. Specifically, we focus on factors that helped maintain engagement in a workers’ cause among participants of a failed teachers’ strike. We examined the relative role of positive and negative experiences and how they related to a sense of personal significance as motivators of further collective action after the failure of a national strike that a large group of teachers participated in. We also compared the effects of experienced emotional states with the effects of expectancy of success. The results suggest that when people experienced a boost in feelings of significance, even if the collective action failed, they were more willing to participate in a future collective action. We also found that expectancy was related to willingness to take part in another strike or other protest actions, which is in line with past studies.