lan of organization for the
stove molding industry. Every year two committees of three members each,
chosen respectively by the union and the association, were to meet in
conference and to draw up general laws for the year. In case of a
dispute arising in a locality, if the parties immediately concerned were
unable to arrive at common terms, the chief executives of both
organizations, the president of the union and the president of the
association, were to step in and try to effect an adjustment. If,
however, they, too, failed, a conference committee composed of an equal
number of members from each side was to be called in and its findings
were to be final. Meanwhile the parties were enjoined from engaging in
hostilities while the matter at dispute was being dealt with by the duly
appointed authorities. Each organization obligated itself to exercise
"police authority" over its constituents, enforcing obedience to the
agreement. The endorsement of the plan by both organizations was
practically unanimous, and has continued in operation without
interruption for thirty years until the present day.

Since the end of the nineties the trade agreement has become one of the
most generally accepted principles and aspirations of the American labor
movement. However, it is not to be understood that by accepting the
principle of the trade agreement the labor movement has committed
itself to unlimited arbitration of industrial disputes. The basic idea
of the trade agreement is that of collective bargaining rather than
arbitration. The two terms are not always distinguished, but the
essential difference is that in the trade agreement proper no outside
party intervenes to settle the dispute and make an award. The agreement
is made by direct negotiation between the two organized groups and the
sanction which each holds over the head of the other is the strike or
lockout. If no agreement can be reached, the labor organization as well
as the employers' association, insists on its right to refuse
arbitration, whether it be "voluntary" or so-called "compulsory."

The clarification of the conception of the trade agreement was perhaps
the main achievement of the nineties. Without the trade agreement the
labor movement could hardly come to eschew "panaceas" and to
reconstitute itself upon the basis of opportunism. The coming in of the
trade agreement, whether national, sectional, or local, was also the
chief factor in stabilizing the movement