Tuesday, August 7, 2007

lockout

lockout: cierre patronal

A lockout is a work stoppage in which an employer prevents employees from working. This is differentiated from a strike, in which employees refuse to work.

Yesterday I ran across the term "workbench lockout" to descibe an incident where "union members had been assigned fault equipment, not given materials or work orders on time in order to meed production goals, denied overtime hours, subjected to under-counting of production ...." in this fabulous article:

Traub-Werner, Marion and Cravey, Altha (2002) Spatiality, sweatshops and solidarity in Guatemala. Social and Cultural Geography. 3 (4), 383-401.

about the campaign for the first maquila union in Guatemala at the Van Husen shop, which went on for years and I responded to many action alerts on. If you also work on consumer solidarity I recommend the article (if you don't have academic access I can send it to you). But really, the point for this blog is that I'm not sure what term to use for that. I'm going to ask Marion, but anyone else have ideas?

2 comments:

d said...

Different, but related:
Strike in Latin America, from what I know is paro. But paro is unemployment (desempleo) in Spain.

Those things you learn when you get lost in translation during a macroeconomics test...

Big Bend Farmworker Alliance said...

Is there a difference bbetween a paro and a huelga?