National employer co-ordination has been prompted by three major factors: the need to counteract unions, compulsory arbitration legislation, and national arbitration test cases. The last has necessitated machinery to ensure that employer submissions are not at cross-purposes with each other. This paper reviews the development of transient co-ordinating machinery for dealing with unions in the 1890s, the federation of trade associations to counteract compulsory arbitration, and the test case machinery that has evolved since the early 1920s.
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