is sought by
an insistence on the closed union shop, by the recognition of the right
of appeal to grievance boards in cases of discharge to prevent
anti-union discrimination, and through establishing a seniority right in
promotion which binds the worker's allegiance to his union rather than
to the employer.

With these rigid rules, partly already enforced on the employer by
strikes or threats to strike and partly as yet unrealized but
energetically pushed, trade unionism enters the stage of the trade
agreement. The problem of industrial government then becomes one of
steady adjustment of the conflicting claims of employer and union for
the province of shop control staked out by these working rules. When the
two sides are approximately equal in bargaining strength (and lasting
agreements are possible only when this condition obtains), a promising
line of compromise, as recent experience has shown, has been to extend
to the unions and their members in some form that will least obstruct
shop efficiency the very same kind of guarantees which they strive to
obtain through rules of their own making. For instance, an employer
might induce a union to give up or agree to mitigate its working rules
designed to protect the job by offering a _quid pro quo_ in a guarantee
of employment for a stated number of weeks during the year; and
likewise, a union might hope to counteract the employer's natural
hankering for being "boss in his own business," free of any union
working rules, only provided it guaranteed him a sufficient output per
unit of labor time and wage investment.

However, compromises of this sort are pure experiments even at
present--fifteen to twenty years after the dissolution of those
agreements; and they certainly require more faith in government by
agreement and more patience than one could expect in the participants in
these earlier agreements. It is not surprising, therefore, that the
short period of agreements after 1898 should in many industries have
formed but a prelude to an "open-shop" movement.[67]

After their breach with the union, the National Founders' Association
and the National Metal Trades' Association have gone about the business
of union wrecking in a systematic way. They have maintained a so-called
"labor bureau," furnishing men to their members whenever additional help
was needed, and keeping a complete card system record of every man in
the employ of members. By this system occasion was remove