Alockout is awork stoppage or denial of employment initiated by the management of a company during alabor dispute.[1] In contrast to astrike, in which employees refuse to work, a lockout is initiated by employers or industry owners.
Lockouts are usually implemented by simply refusing to admit employees onto company premises, and may include changing locks or hiring security guards for the premises. Other implementations include afine for showing up, or a simple refusal of clocking in on thetime clock. For these reasons, lockouts are referred to as theantithesis of strikes.
In professional sports in the United States and Canada, theNational Football League,Major League Baseball, theNational Basketball Association, and theNational Hockey League have all experienced lockouts.
A lockout is generally an attempt to enforce specific terms of employment upon a group of employees during a dispute. It is often used to convince unionized workers to accept new conditions, such as lower wages. If the union is asking for higher wages, better benefits, or maintaining benefits, a manager may use the threat of a lockout – or an actual lockout – to convince the union to relent.
Far from all labour disputes involve lockouts (or strikes), but lockouts have been used on a large scale around the world during and after industrialization. Some of the lockout incidents are historically significant.
TheDublin Lockout was a majorindustrial dispute between 20,000 workers and 300 employers inDublin. The dispute lasted from 26 August 1913 to 18 January 1914, and is often viewed as the most severe and significant industrial dispute in thehistory of Ireland. Central to the dispute was theright to unionize.
In theUnited States, underfederal labor law, an employer may hire only temporary replacements during a lockout. In a strike, unless it is anunfair labor practice strike, an employer may legally hire permanent replacements. Also, in manyUS states, employees who are locked out are eligible to receiveunemployment benefits,[2] but they are not eligible for such benefits during a strike.[3][4]
For the above reasons, many American employers have historically been reluctant to impose lockouts and instead try to provoke a strike. However, as American unions have increasingly begun to resort toslowdowns rather than strikes, lockouts have become a more common tactic of many employers.
In 1892, after several wage cuts and disputes with the employers at the Homestead Steel Mill inHomestead, Pennsylvania, the union called for a strike after the company stopped discussing its decisions with the union.Henry Clay Frick shut down the plant and locked out all workers, preventing them from entering the mill.
Lockouts have also occurred in professional sports, usually due to disputes between team owners and players concerning their league'scollective bargaining agreement.Major League Baseball has seen four lockouts in modern history, including during the1990 and2021–22 offseasons.[5] TheNational Basketball Association had four in the1995 offseason, the1996 offseason, and the1998–99 and2011–12 seasons. TheNational Hockey League endured lockouts in1994–95,2004–05 and2012–13, with the 2004–05 lockout ultimately resulting in the entire season being canceled.[6] Besides aplayer lockout in 2011, theNational Football League had two involving referees in2001 and2012.[7]
In September 2016,Long Island University became the first institution of higher education to use a lockout against its faculty members.[8][9]
On 8 April, 1998,stevedoring companyPatrick Corporation sought to restructure its operations for productivity reasons. In anindustrial watershed event, it sacked all its workers and imposed a lockout on wharves around Australia.[10]
On 29 October 2011,Qantas declared a lockout of all domestic employees in the face ofongoing union industrial action. That cancelled all flights, grounding the entire fleet for several days.[11]
On August 15, 2005, 5,500 employees of theCanadian Broadcasting Corporation, a Canadian public broadcaster were locked out by CEORobert Rabinovitch in a dispute over future hiring practices. While services continued during the lockout, programming consisted mainly of repeats, with news coverage being provided by theBBC on TV and wire-service feeds on radio.[12] The lock-out ended on October 11, 2005.
In August 2025,Dalhousie University inHalifax, Nova Scotia became the firstU15 institution in Canada to initiate a lockout against Dalhousie Faculty Association (DFA), the university's facultylabour union, several days before the union was able to complete their vote on the university's final offer.[13] The university claimed that they did not the financial capacity to have their wages keep up withinflation; whereas the union claimed that the university favoured spending on infrastructure such as a new sports arena over paying their employees a fair wage.[14]
On 2 April 2013, the Danish Union of Teachers (Danish:Danmarks Lærerforening) and the National Union of Municipalities (Danish:Kommunernes Landsforening) declared a lockout for more than 60,000 primary school teachers across the country. Over 600,000 students were also affected by the lockout and could not go to school.
The dispute was about whether teachers should have extra working time, as the Local Government Association (KL) wanted. The Danish Union of Teachers (DFL) was against it and could not find a solution.[15] After 24 days of being locked out, the teachers lost the labour dispute on 25 April 2013, with a government intervention to end the lockout. The government chose to apply all of KL's main demands, and the teachers received a small wage increase as compensation.
The termlock-in refers to the practice of physically preventing workers from leaving a workplace.[citation needed]
More recently, lock-ins have been carried out by employees against management, which have been labeled 'bossnapping' by the media.[citation needed] In France during March 2009,3M's national manager was locked in his office for 24 hours by employees in a dispute over redundancies.[16][17][18] The following month, union employees of a call center managed bySynovate inAuckland locked the front doors of the office, in response to management locking them out.[19]
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