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20 persons, premises, and equipment that might otherwise be caused by their sudden cessation of work.

The Board first applied this “reasonable precautions” principle to rank-and-file employees in Marshall Car Wheel & Foundry Co., Inc., 107 N. L. R. B. 314, 315 (1953), enf. denied on other grounds, 218 F. 2d 409 (CA5 1955). There, employees at a foundry walked off the job at a time when the foundry’s furnace was full of hot molten iron, threatening severe damage to the employer’s plant and equipment. 107 N. L. R. B., at 315. The Board concluded that the employees’ strike conduct was not protected by the NLRA, because the employees had a “duty to take reasonable precautions to protect the employer’s physical plant from such imminent damage as for[e]seeably would result from their sudden cessation of work.” Ibid.

The Board has also applied this principle in other similar cases. It determined, for example, that strikers who walked out of a certain kind of chemical plant—a plant that handled “extremely hazardous” chemicals that were “a hazard not only to employees but also to individuals living in the vicinity”—without shutting down the equipment had engaged in unprotected conduct. General Chemical Corp., 290 N. L. R. B. 76, 77, 83 (1988). Similarly, the Board held that the strike conduct of security guards whose walkout exposed a federal building’s occupants to “imminent” danger was not protected by the NLRA. International Protective Servs., Inc., 339 N. L. R. B. 701, 703 (2003).

But the narrow duty that Marshall Car Wheel and its progeny impose does not—and cannot—displace the general rule that labor strikes are protected even when the workers’ withdrawal of their labor inflicts economic harm on the employer. So the Board has also repeatedly held that employees have no duty to prevent the loss of perishable goods caused by their sudden cessation of work.

In a leading case, employees at a raw poultry plant