LOCKOUT. - Suspension of work in factories, workshops, and industries, decided by the owners in order to combat strikes or to oppose changes to labor agreements. Like the strike, of which it constitutes in a certain sense the counterpart, the lockout is substantially tied to the economic-social order commonly called capitalistic and finds its greatest application in the second part of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th. With regard to it as well, public authority has assumed quite different attitudes: these range from prohibition and condemnation (as, for example, in articles 414-16 of the Napoleonic Penal Code) to more or less explicit permission.
Article 40 of the new Italian Constitution does not speak of such a right; it says simply that "the right to strike is exercised within the framework of the laws that regulate it."
All attempts made to place strike and lockout on the same level (the Giannini amendment and the Quinteri amendment) were rejected. Juridically, therefore, the right of lockout cannot be configured in the same way as the right to strike; while the latter is constitutionally guaranteed and a future law prohibiting it would be unconstitutional, the former is not, so that it could be excluded from ordinary legislation without conflicting with the Constitution.
More complex is the further question of whether the lockout is incompatible with the constitutional text. There are two currents of thought on this matter: some, starting from the fact that the strike and the lockout constitute an exception to the principle that defense must be reserved to public authority and that exceptions cannot be presumed, hold that the lockout is incompatible with our Constitution; consequently a law that authorized it would be unconstitutional; "even if the trade-union law did not explicitly prohibit it, the lockout should be considered, according to common law, a breach of the employer's obligation arising from the labor contract" (F. Santoro-Passarelli, Verso la legge sindacale, in Iustitia, 2 [1949], p. 51). Others, on the other hand, point out that the silence of the Constitution is... silence and nothing more; everything is therefore left to ordinary legislation.
On the moral judgment as well, Catholics are not entirely in agreement. Substantially we can gather the various opinions into three main groups. Some hold that the lockout can and must be placed on the same level as the strike, and therefore, under the conditions indicated for the strike, can be called legitimate; the employer too can in fact find himself in the worker's condition, that is, having no other way to defend a just cause and at the same time having well-founded hope of success and a reasonable proportion between the goods he hopes to obtain for himself and for his own and the evils he fears he must provoke for others. This is generally the view of moralists, especially the older ones, Merkelbach, for example (Summa theol. mor., II, Paris 1947, n. 553, p. 583). Others, on the other hand, hold that in this regard there exists a substantial difference between employers and workers. While the latter can find themselves in situations so grave that they can or even must resort to the strike as a means of struggle, the former can never say the same; the worker strikes for motives that are far closer to the fundamental needs of life than those for which the employer locks out. Consequently strike and lockout cannot be placed on the same level. While the former can be lawful, the latter cannot. This is the view of some moralists and Christian thinkers more directly engaged in the social field (for example, some editors of the Revue de l'action populaire and Christian trade unionists). A third group, numerically quite small, thinks that, if the conditions indicated for the morality of the strike are present, the lockout too can be lawful and obligatory; however, it holds that such conditions are far more difficult to meet for the lockout than for the strike. Thus, for example, L. Ruland, Ausserung, in Staatslexikon, I, pp. 494-96.
This last position seems the wisest. In any case, all agree in holding that, other things being equal, the lockout is lawful to the same extent as the strike; not all agree in holding that this equality does or does not occur; classical moralists seem to assume without further ado that this equality can occur very easily and quite frequently; trade unionists assume without further ado that such equality never occurs; others, perhaps more prudently, concede to the trade unionists against the classical moralists that there exists a profound difference between the position of the worker and that of the employer; they deny that the difference is such as to preclude every possibility that, at least in some case, what happens for the worker can happen for the employer.