Industries are bodies which are essentially an endeavour of cooperation between two elements: capital and labour. These two elements are the two most crucial elements for an industry to not only survive but also thrive. This is why it becomes extremely important to handle the quite opposite interests of the above two elements. To ensure that their interests remain safeguarded, these two elements opt for different procedures and strategies. Over the years, with rising worker-centric movements across the globe, there have been mechanisms established to iron out conflicts between these two necessary elements of industries. Strikes and lock-outs are the two most common moves that they resort to in times of conflict.
A strike is a move that the employees make to enforce their collective demands on the employers. Similarly, a lock-out is a weapon that the employers can use as a coercive tool to ensure that his demands are accepted by people on the other side of the line.

Provision for Lock-out

Section 2(1) of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 contains the definition of ‘Lock-out’. A lock-out is a ‘temporary closing of employment or the suspension of work, or the refusal by an employer’ to employ anyone else. Lock-outs are implemented by preventing the employees from entering the premises of the company/factory. The first such lockout in the recorded history in India took place in 1895 in the case of ‘Budge Budge Jute Mills’.

It is important to be clear that permanently discontinuing business would not be deemed a lock-out. Lock-out would be temporarily closing down the place of business and not the cessation of business itself. As and when it is declared by the employer that there would be a lock-out, the employees don’t need to come to the place of work.

Skewed Power Dynamics

Economic development and inclination towards pro-capitalist policies by governments of most of the countries in the world has resulted in a scenario that one element has overwhelming power over the other when it comes to industries. The power dynamics between employers and employees makes the employees extremely vulnerable and subject to the employers’ demands. It can be observed that whenever nowadays, there is a strike, almost always it is being used by employees to resist or defend themselves from the exploitative deeds of the employers. The weapon of lock-out makes the employer even more power to exploit the already vulnerable employers.

Payment of Wages in Case of a Legal but Unjustified Lockout

Judicial bodies have usually opined to award wages to workers in situations where a lockout was legal but unjustified. One such case was ‘Bharat Barrel and Drum Manufacturing Co. v. Their Workmen’ (1952).

In the above mentioned case, workers of the company arrived at the place of work at the appointed time and found the doors locked. After waiting for an hour, they left the premises. The employers imposed a lock-out on the employees for not attending the work of that particular day. The Tribunal, holding the lock-out legal but unjustified, decided that the workers were entitled to their wages for the period of the lock-out.