the important national unions in the building industry, but especially because it promulgated a new principle which, if generally adopted, was apparently destined to revolutionize the structure of American labor organizations.  The Alliance purported to be a federation of the “basic” trades in the industry, and in reality it did represent an entente of the big and aggressive unions.  The latter were moved to federate not only for the purpose of forcing the struggle against the employers, but also of expanding at the expense of the “non-basic” or weak unions, besides seeking to annihilate the last vestiges of the International Building Trades’ Council.  The Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, probably the most aggressive union in the American Federation of Labor, was the leader in this movement.  From the standpoint of the Federation, the Structural Alliance was at best an extra-legal organization, as it did not receive the latter’s formal sanction, but the Federation could scarcely afford to ignore it as it had ignored the International Building Trades’ Council.  Thus in 1908 the Alliance was “legitimatized” and made a “Department” of the American Federation of Labor, under the name of the Building Trades’ Department, with the settlement of jurisdictional disputes as its main function.  It was accompanied by departments of metal trades, of railway employes, of miners, and by a “label” department.

It is not, however, open to much doubt that the Department was not a very successful custodian of the trade autonomy principle.  Jurisdictional disputes are caused either by technical changes, which play havoc with official “jurisdiction,” or else by a plain desire on the part of the stronger union to encroach upon the province of the weaker one.  When the former was the case and the struggle happened to be between unions of equal strength and influence, it generally terminated in a compromise.  When, however, the combatants were two unions of unequal strength, the doctrine of the supremacy of the “basic” unions was generally made to prevail in the end.  Such was the outcome of the struggle between the carpenters and joiners on the one side and the wood workers on the other and also between the plumbers and steam fitters.  In each case it ended in the forced amalgamation of the weaker union with the stronger one, upon the principle that there must be only one union in each “basic” trade.  In the case of the steam fitters, which was settled at the convention at Rochester in 1912, the Federation gave what might be interpreted as an official sanction of the new doctrine of one union in a “basic” trade.