The role of trust in determining the willingness to join a strike

This paper offers a contribution to the literature on strike activity by analyzing the effect of trust in labour disputes. I maintain that the higher is the level of confidence that people have in unions with respect to that placed on the firm, the more likely is their participation or their willingness to participate to a strike. A very simple model has been presented to clarify this idea, which seems supported also on the empirical side. In particular using WVS data, it has been shown that the probability of having participated or to be willing to participate to an unofficial strike decreases (increases) as the level of confidence in labour unions (firms) decreases.