Lockout law in Australia: The case for reform

Should Australian lockout law be reformed? Lockouts in Australia are legally the formal equal of strikes and the legal treatment of lockouts is the most 'de-regulated' in the OECD. The notion that strikes and lockouts should be treated equally is intuitively appealing. However, other OECD nations have rejected an equal right to strike and lockout, reserving lockouts for exceptional circumstances where employers suffer from an imbalance of bargaining power so as to reconcile lockouts with other legal principles such as freedom of association and the right to strike. Australian employers, it will be argued, have been given too much freedom by policy makers at federal level to use lockouts that should legally be reserved as a weapon of genuine 'last resort'. However, instead of repositioning Australian lockout law back towards the international mainstream, WorkChoices will produce a legal framework that, uniquely, positively discriminates in favour of employer lockouts against strikes.