In recent years the General Council of the TUC has moved toward assuming a stronger position in the field of industrial strikes. It has tried to show the workers that the strike is a two-edged sword that wounds both worker and employer. The TUC maintains that the strike, the workers' great weapon, should not be used indiscriminately because of the damage a strike by one union can do to other unions and to the national economy. At the 1955 TUC conference the General Council won acceptance of a proposal that it intervene in any case of a threatened strike when negotiations between the employers and the unions seem likely to break down, throwing the members of other unions out of work or endangering their wages, hours, and conditions. This is a significant step forward. Formerly the TUC could move only after negotiations had broken down and a deadlock had been reached. In other words, the TUC acted only at the moment when both sides were firmly entrenched. But this advance does not improve organized labor's position in regard to the problem of restrictive practices, a problem that is as serious as strikes or threats of strikes. The _Daily Mirror_ of London, that brash, vigorous tabloid which is the favorite newspaper of the industrial working class, published an inquiry into the trade unions in 1956. Its authors, Sydney Jacobson and William Connor, who conducts the column signed "Cassandra," traced the origin of restrictive practices back to 1811, when bands of workers known as the Luddites broke into lace and stocking factories and smashed the machinery. "The suspicion toward new methods has never entirely died out in this country," they wrote, "and although sabotage of machinery is rare (but not unknown) the protests have taken a new direction--the slowing down of output by the men themselves and the development of a whole series of practices that cut down the production of goods and services." Any reader of the British press can recall dozens of instances of restrictive practices by labor. One famous one concerned the floating grain elevator at Hull, an east-coast seaport. This elevator, which cost £200,000 ($560,000), was kept idle for two months because the Transport and General Workers Union insisted that it should be worked by twice as many men as the Transport Commission thought necessary. The Transport Commission, incidentally, represented a nationalized industry. And there was the union that fined a milkman £2 for delivering milk before 7:30 a.m.