Editing Open shop (section)

===Union arguments===
''Open shop'' means a factory, office, or other business establishment in which a union, chosen by a majority of the employees, acts as representative of all the employees in making agreements with the employer, but union membership is not a condition of being hired.

Unions have argued against the open shop adopted by [[United States]] employers in the first decade of the twentieth century, seeing it as an attempt to drive unions out of industries. For example, construction [[craft unionism|craft unions]] have always relied on controlling the supply of labor in particular trades and geographical areas as a means of maintaining union standards and establishing collective bargaining relations with the employers in that field.

In order to do that, unions argued, construction unions&mdash;and to a lesser extent unions representing musicians, [[stevedore|longshore workers]], restaurant employees, and others who work on a transitory and relatively brief basis&mdash;must require that employers hire only their members.

The open shop was also a key component of the [[American Plan (union negotiations)|American Plan]] introduced in the 1920s. In that era the open shop was directed not only at construction unions but also unions in mass production industries. Unions again felt that these proposed policies would give employers the opportunity to discriminate against union members in employment and would also lead to a steadfast opposition to collective bargaining of any sort