12018 Strikes and Lockouts in a Democratic Perspective 1

Credits: 3 graduate credits in Democracy Studies / Society and Politics or in Business Administration / Administration and Public Policy

Prerequisites for Democracy Studies: Democracy: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Israeli Democracy: Selected Issues, Contemporary Democratic Theories; one of the following: Democracy and Democratization, Selected Problems in the History of Western Democracies, Democracy and Mass Communication,2 Selected Topics in Public Administration (or Public Policy: Theory to Practice), Education Policy: Education for Democracy in Democratic Societies; and exemption from bibliographic assignments on computer searches in the “Alef” catalog and databases.

Prerequisites for the MBA: Operations Research; Accounting for Managers; Marketing; Management and Organizational Behavior; Financial Management; Corporate Law for Managers.

Author: Ruth Ben-Israel. The materials also include a reader with Israeli Supreme Court and Labor Court rulings, international treaties, legislation and selected articles.

Objectives: To provide basic information on the essence of the right to strike or lockout on one hand, and the importance of legal recognition of these institutions in maintaining a democratic society on the other; To develop the student’s ability to deal with legal materials, Israeli and international and to read legal texts, particularly court decisions and legislation, which determine the limits of democracy with respect to the right to strike and lockout; To familiarize students with the prevalent approaches concerning the limits of the use of the right to strike and lockout in a democratic society; To discuss the mutual relations between the recognition of the right to strike and lockout as a universal human right and the recognition of these rights as basic constitutional rights in a democratic society.

Topics: The status of the strike and the lockout as basic constitutional rights; The strike – level of action, type of action, objectives of action, limitations and prohibitions; The lockout – status and definition.


1Students in the Democracy Studies program may write a seminar paper in this course, although it is not required. Students in the MBA program may not write a seminar paper in this course.

2or Liberalism: Texts, Contexts, Critiques (12005), for students who took it as a required course in the Culture specialization before Spring 2010.