A jurisdictional strike is a term in United States labor law that refers to a concerted refusal to work undertaken by a union to assert its members' right to particular job assignments and to protest the assignment of disputed work to members of another union or to unorganized workers. (Labor unions use the term jurisdiction to refer to their claims to represent workers who perform a certain type of work and the right of their members to perform such work.) The Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act empowered the National Labor Relations Board to resolve such jurisdictional disputes and authorized the General Counsel of the NLRB to seek an injunction barring such strikes. The NLRB, almost without exception, resolves jurisdictional disputes on the basis of the employer's preference in assigning work, with efficiency, custom and practice, and contractual obligations playing at most a secondary role.
Jurisdictional strikes occur most frequently in the United States in the construction industry. Construction unions frequently resolve those disputes through a privately created adjustment system.
In Australia, jurisdiction strikes are called demarcation disputes.
Famous quotes containing the word strike:
“When we walk the streets at night in safety, it does not strike us that this might be otherwise. This habit of feeling safe has become second nature, and we do not reflect on just how this is due solely to the working of special institutions. Commonplace thinking often has the impression that force holds the state together, but in fact its only bond is the fundamental sense of order which everybody possesses.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)