DISCUSSION.

The article presents a discussion on trade union activity. Until a decade ago, trade union activity from the standpoint of legal and public sanction involved the problem of extending to voluntary associations those civil rights of the individual, whereby members of such associations could improve their well-being through group action. However, trade union activity in the present day raises entirely different issues of social policy. These arise from the extension of group authority or control, under governmental and public approval, over large segments of industry, if not over the whole economy. These issues involve not alone the question of what form of economic organization is to be desired, or what the essential functions of government should be in a democratic order, but that of how individual and minority rights are to be preserved in a scheme of things progressively subjected to group domination. Professor David A. McCabe's paper is mainly a discussion of the technical feasibility of industry-wide agreements. But McCabe's paper also raises the issue of group power and responsibility in economic life. According to McCabe, industry-wide agreements are based upon unitary bargaining for wages over a wide competitive area.