Many of the characteristics of American labor-management relationships are identical to those of the 1920s and early 1930s-the eve of the New Deal and the Wagner Act. There are numerous similarities between the two periods. One difference is that the post-World War II period has fostered multi-employer and industrywide pattern bargaining relationships that are now being eroded or dissolved. Another is that the advent of multinational corporations which cut across national boundaries seems to have placed national unions at something of a disadvantage. Today, as then-slightly more than fifty years ago-the unions are in retreat on virtually all fronts. Then, as now, there are multiple causes-economic circumstances: tolerance of unemployment at increasingly high levels, faith in a kind of swashbuckling individualism, the rise of overt management anti-union practices, trade union lethargy and bewilderment, and the law. Today, these changes are not limited to our shores but are present in most industrialized countries throughout the world. Fifteen years after the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act, Professor Irving Bernstein, in his important work, The New Deal Collective Bargaining Policy, noted that on the eve of the Great Depression and the New Deal, union membership had retrogressed to the level obtained in 1917: When the percentage of the total work force is consid