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 association to a stable organization more and more the emphasis is shifted from wages to working rules.  Unionists have discovered that on the whole wages are the unstable factor, going up or down, depending on fluctuating business conditions and cost of living; but that once they have established their power by making the employer accept their working rules, high wages will ultimately follow.

These working rules are seldom improvisations of the moment, but, crude and one-sided as they often are, they are the product of a long labor experience and have taken many years to be shaped and hammered out.  Since their purpose is protective, they can best be classified with reference to the particular thing in the workingman’s life which they are designed to protect:  the standard of living of the trade group, health, the security of the worker’s job, equal treatment in the shop and an equal chance with other workmen in promotion, the bargaining power of the trade group, as a whole, and the safety of the union from the employer’s attempts to undermine it.  We shall mention only a few of these rules by way of illustration.  Thus all rules relating to methods of wage payment, like the prohibition of piece work and of bonus systems (including those associated with scientific management systems), are primarily devices to protect the wage earner’s rate of pay against being “nibbled away” by the employer; and in part also to protect his health against undue exertion.  Other rules like the normal (usually the eight-hour) day with a higher rate for overtime; the rule demanding a guarantee of continuous employment for a stated time or a guarantee of minimum earnings,