BOYCOTTS AND LOCKOUTS ANTI-IMPASSE WEAPONS

Boycotts and Lockouts Anti-Impasse Weapons

Boycotts and Lockouts Anti-Impasse Weapons

Introduction

This paper has been prepared to provide assistance in compliance with USA OSHA standards and/or Best Management Practices. It should not be used without consideration of the unique conditions and requirements at each working site. It may be necessary to modify the program for your specific needs.

"Boycotts and Lockouts" refers to specific practices and procedures to safeguard employees from the unexpected energization or startup of machinery and equipment, or the release of hazardous energy during service or maintenance activities

Routinization and its Discontents

As we indicated above, employer counter-movements are sometimes visible and direct. In other instances, employers draw upon their institutional power through state structures to narrow the unions' room for maneuvering, to weaken their “political opportunity structure.” Drafted by a team of corporate lawyers and passed in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act served, in many respects, as a repeal of the “Wagner Act” of 1935, which had played such a key role in the establishment of industrial unionism. As we've indicated, it was designed to accomplish several longstanding goals of American employers. First, it substantially weakened union security by outlawing the closed shop, by making the union shop subject to an election supervised by the Federal labor board (the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB]), rather than by the force of collective mobilization, and by establishing mechanisms by which union members could arrange to have their union officially “decertified.” The Act allowed states to restrict union security even further, creating a region of anti-union “right to work” states that came to encompass a huge part of the US.

Second, under the Taft-Hartley Act, the most effective forms of industrial action were declared illegal. Sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts, forms of action through which working class solidarity had been successfully expressed in communities throughout the United States, were now forbidden. The President was given the newfound power to impose a temporary 60-day halt to any strike deemed likely “to imperil the national health or safety,” a provision that was invoked 7 times in the first year of its passage, and 29 times over the next two decades (United States Department of Labor 1969). The Act further strengthened employers' ability to respond to strikes by allowing strikebreakers the right to vote in union representation elections and to participate in the decertification of existing unions, and gave employers the opportunity to seek injunctions against mass picketing.

For unions forced to operate within such a framework of strict “bureaucratic” constraints, the mobilization of collective action still represented an important dimension of trade union activity. Although contemporary unions normally trade away their right to strike during the course of the contract period, they maintain the right to strike between contracts. On one level, this has made strikes more predictable, to the extent that employers could better prepare for them, thus making strikes less of a threat. Indeed, the strike, which has historically represented the union movement's tour de force, has a long process of routinization in the ...