Lockouts and Replacement Workers

Unions have the potential to strike against an employer if collective bargaining efforts have failed, but management also has a right to prevent employees from working in certain cases. Two significant tools in management’s arsenal are lockouts and replacement workers.
A lockout occurs when management stops all work and physically prevents workers from entering the workplace. Lockouts can put economic pressure on members of the union due to the fact that employees may not be paid during the period of a lockout. If management and union representatives have made a legitimate attempt to come to an agreement on a contract but have reached an impasse in their collective bargaining process, then management is allowed to use a lockout. If negotiations have not reached a stalemate, a lockout is likely to be illegal.
Another tool that management may employ in the case of a strike is the hiring of replacement workers. This action is generally legal. However, whether or not striking employees have to be offered their jobs back depends on the type of strike action undertaken by the union and its members.
An economic strike is a work stoppage over authorized collective bargaining issues such as pay or working conditions. In the case of an economic strike, “an employer may not discriminate against a striker, but the employer is not obligated to lay off a replacement worker to give a striker his job back.”
Alternately, a strike may be called because an employer engages in unfair labor practices as defined under the NLRA. In the case of an unfair labor practices strike, the employees are protected from being permanently replaced and must be offered their jobs back when the strike concludes.