Labor problems used to emphasize hours of labor, industrial safety and other conditions of work, problems of child and female labor, attempts at organization, and, of course, wage and employment problems. Historical developments have brought to the fore new concepts such as social security, collective bargaining, and arbitration, as well as reformulations of older problems of the terms and conditions of employment. Conceptualizations have been modified with respect to labor force and labor market behavior, with attempts to apply many economic models to wage-employment problems in the aggregate and in the particular. Public policies and laws have multiplied as they relate to these subjects, and specialized fields within or bearing on labor economics and industrial relations have emerged. The facts must be allowed to speak, albeit with the interpretation necessary to understanding that a mere catalog of facts can never yield. Theories will help give body to these bare factual bones, but readers must remember also that the test of a good theory is that it works.

When a number of employers organize to engage in joint negotiations with a union, their principal task is to develop policies and positions which are, in a sense, the greatest common denominators of the needs of the individual concerns. No one policy will normally be ideally adapted to the needs of any one company. Group acceptance must be secured. A considerable part of the study made by Garrett and Tripp relates to the resulting problems. Those sections in their report dealing with the process of employer organization, the methods of handling selected subjects in negotiations, and the rise of conflicting interests among the employers are all valuable additions to industrial relations literature. In addition to the sections just referred to, the study includes analyses of two aspects of the management problem in joint dealing that should be mentioned particularly because they are pioneering contributions. Reference is to the treatment of two questions: (1) What are the objectives of management organization for multi-employer bargaining? (2) What controls may be desirable to assure reasonably uniform administration of group collective bargaining agreements? In grappling with these questions management is likely to cope with the most complex problems which confront it in the practice of multi-employer bargaining.