The employers' restrictive practices are less widely advertised than those of the workers. Their classic form is the price-fixing agreement which insures that even the least efficient manufacturing firms will have a profit margin. To maintain the price-fixing system, employers maintain private investigators and courts of inquiry; they can and do discipline the maverick who breaks out of the herd. One expression of the employers' approach is the tender of contracts identical to the last farthing. Britain in 1955 lost the contract for the Snowy River hydroelectric plant in Australia largely because the eight British firms among the twenty that submitted tenders all submitted exactly the same amount. In New Zealand nineteen out of twenty-six companies bidding for an electric-cable contract submitted identical figures. The practice is embedded in British industry. Legislation to combat it was introduced into the House of Commons in 1956, but objective experts on the subject believed the legislation fell far short of the drastic action necessary. Restrictive practices are only too evident in the larger field of relations between the worker and the boss. The importance of problems in this area of conflict is multiplied by their political implications and by the fact that Britain, like other countries, is entering a new period of industrial development. The industrial use of nuclear energy for power and the advent of automation can produce a new industrial revolution in the homeland of the first industrial revolution. But this cannot improve the British economy--indeed, the revolution cannot really get under way as a national effort--without greater co-operation between organized labor and employers and managers. Throughout this book there have been references to organized labor and to the Trades Union Congress. Now we encounter them in the special field of industrial relations. Organized labor in Britain is big. There are 23,000,000 people in civil employment, and of these over 9,000,000, nearly the whole of the industrial labor force, are union members. They have an enormous influence on the economic policy of any British government; they are, according to Sir Winston Churchill, "the fourth arm of the Estate"; in the view of Mr. Sam Watson, the tough, capable leader of the Durham miners, they are "the largest single organism in our society."