Economic sanctions are often implemented with laudable intentions – for example, to promote democracy or to deter the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In practice, however, the economic costs of sanctions negatively affect civilian populations in a variety of ways, exacerbating pre-existing social vulnerabilities. While existing work has analyzed the negative effects of sanctions, little attention has been paid to how sanctions affect social mobilization amongst the working class. This thesis critiques the deprivation hypothesis, one attempt to understand how economic sanctions affect protest campaigns and builds toward an understanding that accounts for the harmful effects of sanctions for civilian populations. Applying selectorate theory of authoritarian regimes and the methodology of the subaltern of working-class mobilization, this thesis contributes to resolving this gap in the literature by studying how the intensity and duration of economic sanctions affect the ability for industrial workers to mobilize by building power across political, ideological, and economic dimensions. Does increasing the intensity or duration of economic sanctions help or hurt the chances of success for protest campaigns against authoritarian regimes where industrial workers participate? This thesis employs logistic regression analysis to study the effects of sanctions on the chances of success of protest campaigns. I find statistically significant evidence that industrial workers are an important actor in protest campaigns against authoritarian regimes. I find no statistically significant evidence that economic sanctions help or harm the chances of protest campaigns succeeding, but I find support for the theoretical model of this paper in the context of resource rents.