etal Trades' Association became an
uncompromising enemy of organized labor.

In the following ten years both molders and machinists went on fighting
for control and engaged in strikes with more or less success. But the
industry as a whole never again came so near to embracing the idea of a
joint co-partnership between organized capital and labor as in 1900.

(4) _The Employers' Reaction_

With the disruption of the agreement systems in the machinery producing
and foundry industries, the idea of collective bargaining and union
recognition suffered a setback; and the employers' uneasiness, which had
already steadily been feeding on the unions' mounting pressure for
control, now increased materially. As long, however, as business
remained prosperous and a rising demand for labor favored the unions,
most of the agreements were permitted to continue. Therefore, it was not
until the industrial depression of 1907-1908 had freed the employers'
hands that agreements were disrupted wholesale. In 1905 the Structural
Erectors' Association discontinued its agreements with the Structural
Iron Workers' Union, causing a dispute which continued over many years.
In the course of this dispute the union replied to the victorious
assaults of the employers by tactics of violence and murder, which
culminated in the fatal explosion in the _Los Angeles Times_ Building in
1911. In 1906 the employing lithographers discontinued their national
agreement with the lithographers' union. In 1907 the United Typothetae
broke with the pressmen, and the stove founders with the stove mounters
and stove polishers. In 1908 the agreements between the Lake Carriers
and Lumber Carriers (both operating on the Great Lakes) and the
seafaring and water front unions were terminated.

In the operation of these unsuccessful agreements the most serious
stumbling blocks were the union "working rules," that is to say, the
restrictive rules which unions strove to impose on employers in the
exercise of their managerial powers in the shop, and for which the
latter adopted the sinister collective designation of "restriction of
output."

Successful trade unionism has always pressed "working rules" on the
employer. As early as the first decade of the nineteenth century, the
trade societies then existing tried to impose on the masters the closed
shop and restrictions on apprenticeship along with higher wages and
shorter hours. As a union advances from an ephemeral associa