primary benefit from the existence of wage scales and standards. The maintenance of these standards by a powerful organization prevents that undercutting of rates when jobs are few and workers are many that used to demoralize at every slack period the industry and the people in it, and to destroy what there was of organization among them.

It is at such times, also, that the more far-sighted and responsible among the employers remember the beneficial workings of standards upheld by the union against its individual members at the peak of the season, and consider the value of similar cooperation by the union in the future. These employers are, accordingly, disposed to cooperate in their turn for the maintenance of union standards. It is because the union, as the permanent organization of all the workers, is concerned not merely with the temporary advantage of some of its members-such as individual bargaining at the height of the season might secure them-but rather with the permanent advancement of all, that it pursues a policy of stabilization of wage rates. It aims to minimize the seasonal ups and downs and the dependence of wages on every flurry of trade, and proposes to assure to its members humane and progressive standards of income as a fixed charge upon the industry with which they are so vitally identified.

It is a fact that the union through its enforcement of wage scales and otherwise has exercised a stabilizing influence upon the industry in Chicago at a time when a short-sighted opportunism might have dictated the opposite course. This fact has been clearly recognized by the Board of Arbitration on several occasions in its wage decisions as entitling the workers to special consideration at its hands. In his market award1 of December 22, 1919, Professor Tufts took occasion to declare that "both the Firms and the Union members have made certain financial sacrifices for the sake of a larger end. The labor market is being stabilized; good will is being cultivated, responsibility is being built up. This cannot be overlooked by the Board." And in April, 1921, in a period of severe business depression, when the tendency of wages

everywhere was downward, Professor Millis148 summed up the union's position on this point in the following language:

"In periods of rising prices and of business activity, the Union has exercised its powers of discipline over its members and has restrained them from accepting substantial increases in wages which they could have received with great ease and which indeed were frequently offered by the employers themselves. The agreement has therefore operated in such periods so as to stabilize the market and reduce labor turnover. The Union feels that in return for the stability and restraint granted in periods of business prosperity, the members of the Union should be assured by the agreement the same stability and protection against instability when there is a business lull and when the market is falling. It would be entirely natural for its members to feel that an agreement which made for stabilization in periods of business activity when they were asked to make sacrifices, and which did not ask the same sacrifices of the manufacturers in periods of business depression, was unfair to them. It would be unfortunate, indeed, if the workers were made to feel by a decision that the Board of Arbitration employed double standards."

CHAPTER XIV

THE PRINCIPLE OF UNION PREFERENCE

THE original Hart, Schaffner and Marx Agreement, adopted at the close of the 1910 strike and signed on January 14, 1911, was a strictly open-shop agreement, in the sense that it guaranteed equal treatment to all workers employed by the firm, regardless of their membership in the union. The second of the four provisions embodied in that simple document stipulated that "There shall be no discrimination of any kind whatsoever against any of the employes of Hart, Schaffner and Marx because they are or are not members of the United Garment Workers of America." The agreement, it must be noted, was entered into not officially with the union but only with the employes of Hart, Schaffner and Marx who were, at the time, on strike. The union, as such, was not recognized as a party to the arrangement. It was entitled to exist as a voluntary association of workers who wished to belong to it, but it had no means of approaching the management directly as a trade union. Nor was it, on the other hand, to be singled out for discrimination or suppression, as is usually the case under a so-called open-shop plan.

But to tolerate the existence of a union when it is weak and without power to interfere with the acts and regulations of management affecting the workers, is one thing. To permit that union to grow strong and to seek to extend its control over the workers as a step toward exercising control over the management, is quite another. The theory of the open shop as a permanent arrangement presupposes a stable balance of power as between the employer and the workers, if not a safe preponderance of power on the side of the former. It breaks down in practice as soon as one or the other party attempts to alter the balance. It breaks down when the employer feels himself sufficiently powerful to endeavor to