Picketing and The Law
Picketing, as long as it does not cause obstruction to a highway or intimidation, is legal in many countries and in line with freedom of assembly laws, though many countries do have restrictions on the use of picketing.
Legally defined, recognitional picketing is a method of picketing that applies economic pressure to an employer with the specific goal to force the employer to recognize the issues facing employees and address them through bargaining with a union. In the US, this type of picketing, under Section 8(b) (7) (A) of the Labor Act, is typically illegal if representation is not relevant or is unquestionable.
In the UK mass picketing was made illegal under the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act 1927 after the 1926 General Strike. The Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 gives protection under civil law for pickets who are acting in connection with an industrial dispute at or near their workplace who are using their picketing to peacefully obtain or communicate information or peacefully persuading any person to work or abstain from working. However, many employers have recently taken to gaining injunctions to limit the effect of picketing outside their work place. The granting of injunctions tends to be based on the accusation of intimidation or in general on non-peaceful behaviour and the claim that numbers of the picketers are not from the affected work place. Historically, picketing was banned by a Liberal government in the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1871 but then decriminalised by a Conservative government with the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875.
In the US any strike activity was hard to organize in the early 1900s, however picketing became more common after the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, which limited the ability of employers to gain injunctions to stop strikes, and further legislation which supported the right to organize for the unions. Mass picketing and secondary picketing was however outlawed by The Taft-Hartley Labor Act (1947). Some kinds of pickets are constitutionally protected.
Viewing laws against stalking as potentially inconsistent with labour rights of picketing, the first anti-stalking law of the industrialised world, made by California's lawmakers, inserted provisions that disapply the law from "normal labor picketing", that has survived subsequent amendments.
Read more about this topic: Picketing (protest)
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