Definition of picket line
1 : a position held by a line of military pickets
2 : a line of people picketing a business, organization, or institution
Examples of picket line in a Sentence
She joined her coworkers on the picket line.
Recent Examples on the Web The 10-month strike ripped the town apart as hundreds of workers crossed the picket line.
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Star Tribune, "Austin’s true colors," 23 Feb. 2020 Still today, the mainstream account holds that voting is the mature, civic-minded thing to do, while protest, intraparty challenges, or striking on the picket line are often coded as the recalcitrant position of fringey malcontents.
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Isabel Cristo, The New Republic, "The Bernie Organizers Who Want to Elect Biden—Then Defeat Him," 23 Oct. 2020 This wave of strikes, led most prominently by the United Auto Workers under the ardent social-democrat Walter Reuther, put up to 10 percent of the workforce on the picket line, massively disrupting post-war economic activity.
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Michael Watson, National Review, "The ‘Redistributionist Right’ Would Strengthen Unions to Workers’ Detriment," 19 Oct. 2020 The Wave Rider could form part of a picket line of submarine detection drones, or serve as a communications relay for an underwater listening post.
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Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, "American-Made Spy Boat on Secret Mission Washes Up in Scotland," 8 Oct. 2020 The letters asked each of them to withdraw from the festival and join the picket line, citing their support for unions and workers.
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Kerry Flynn, CNN, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren drop out of The New Yorker Festival in solidarity with magazine's union," 30 Sep. 2020 That’s very much the message that sanitation workers are now bringing to the picket line, and to protests over racist policing.
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Kim Kelly, The New Republic, "New Orleans’ Underpaid, Overexposed Sanitation Workers," 29 June 2020 When the City Council held a hearing on civilian review, the union mounted a five-thousand-member picket line in protest.
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Steven Greenhouse, The New Yorker, "How Police-Union Power Helped Increase Abuses," 18 June 2020 Union members working on the stadium honored the picket line and refused to work.
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Mark Schmetzer, Cincinnati.com, "Rockin' the Riverfront: It was a bumpy road en route to Riverfront Stadium construction," 16 May 2020
See MoreThese example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'picket line.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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Time Traveler for picket line
The first known use of picket line was in 1847
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