Striking Differences: How U.S. and India Navigate the Legal Terrain of Industrial Strikes

This article traverses this history comparatively by focusing on the legal frameworks for strike laws in the US and the history and development of labor protections in India. The two authors will briefly trace their history and theorization before setting them in a broad jurisprudential context by placing them within historically foundational legislation relating to the right to strike, and outline some of the issues that have plagued their enforcement processes. In the US, the legislation that provides for the major governing of the law regarding labor strikes is called National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The NLRA has recognized rights for labor, but it has highly constrained the exercise of labor rights. Similarly, labor’s right to strike in India accrues in the Indian law embodied in the Industrial Disputes Act 1947 on the assumption that saying that workers’ have right to strike also presupposes the possibility that if the labor’s power is left unchecked, it is quite easy for labor actions to be at cross-purposes with bigger social good, and hence to make the issuance of a pre-emptive notice to give advance notice of a strike, and procedures to be complied with mandatory. The law-enforcing processes in these two systems have had their own set of problems; issues with processes of employer recalcitrance, politicization of strikes, and effective dispute resolution mechanisms among the more prominent ones. With the shift in the national economies due to more intense processes of economic globalization on the one hand and a greater emphasis on internationalization (following the example of a growing tendency post-World War II that began moving disputes out of courts towards adopting alternative dispute resolution or arbitration, a newer normative framework on science and social policy put forth by the International Labor Organisation)item with the ILO’s frame of reference, these matrixes will be assessed for their relevance for changing employment policies and contemporary law-making. The history of law in both the US and India demonstrates that the labor law is an effort at continuous redrafting of the Chartists’ maxim to balance labor rights with larger economic and social good.