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:
“We don’t arrive at it by standing on one leg or on the first day of our setting out—but though we may jostle one another on the way that is no reason why we should strike or trample—elbowing’s enough.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)