Strike Duration and Strike Size

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Some theories of strike activity suggest that the settlement probability of a strike depends on the number of workers involved in the strike. Additionally, much recent empirical research on strikes has been constrained by data availability to look only at strikes in large bargaining units. It is natural to ask, therefore, whether strike size systematically influences strike duration, and whether this question poses problems of interpretation for studies confined to samples of large strikes. This paper uses Canadian strike data to examine these questions. We find that size is an important determinant of strike duration and also that studies of strike duration based only on large strikes can yield results that are not representative of the influences for all strikes.