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Labor Strike or Lockout?
When I was producing and promoting last week's Blazers check-in, I used the terms "lockout" and "labor strike" interchangeably to describe what would happen if negotiations between NBA players and team owners fell through. (Which they have. The NBA lockout began on Friday.) During the show, Ben Golliver of BlazersEdge.com called me out on it on Twitter, writing, "A strike is a specific type of dispute where workers stop production. That's not happening here. It's a lockout." This is one of the benefits of Twitter (or drawbacks, depending on your perspective): when you make a mistake you usually hear about it immediately.
My thinking was that more people would be familiar with the term "labor strike," even if it wasn't a perfect descriptor. But "labor strike" isn't accurate at all. That would mean NBA players would be refusing to work, which isn't the case. Instead, they would be barred from working (locked out, if you will) because the players and team owners couldn't come to an agreement.
