While the literature on contentious politics largely focuses on sources of radical opposition, less attention is paid to how governments respond to discontent within their ostensible bases of support. As one of the remaining public sector-driven economies outside the Gulf in MENA, Algeria’s response to the grievances of schoolteachers, police officers, and national oil workers from the Arab Spring (2010-2013) to the Hirak protests (2018-present) pose a unique opportunity to assess this question. Using process tracing and quantitative analysis of original protest and parliamentary datasets from 2010-2020, this paper examines patterns of Algerian public sector strikes and government responses along three facets. First, did the government privilege urban over peripheral public workers or vice-versa? Second, did the regime seek to coopt one segment of the public sector more than another? Third, to what extent were these responses correlated with upticks and downturns in contentious political activity? We hypothesize that the Bouteflika regime unsuccessfully sought to coopt urban security forces at the expense of rurally stationed forces and other public sector groups, and that this helped fuel the Hirak movement. In light of the limited success of recent protests in Algeria, this study holds generalizable implications for how governments seek to instrumentalize parliaments to quell protests after the Arab Spring. In doing so, we also seek to present a theoretical and methodological intervention that can help bridge the studies of parliaments and contentious politics under authoritarian regimes.