All this was secret, but secrets will out.
Members of the favored unions told their wives, and the wives gossiped, and soon all the labor world knew what had happened.
It was merely the logical development of what in the nineteenth century had been known as grab-sharing.

In the industrial warfare of that time, profit-sharing had been tried.

That is, the capitalists had striven to placate the workers by interesting them financially in their work.
But profit-sharing, as a system, was ridiculous and impossible.
Profit-sharing could be successful only in isolated cases in the midst of a system of industrial strife; for if all labor and all capital shared profits, the same conditions would obtain as did obtain when there was no profit-sharing.
So, out of the unpractical idea of profit-sharing, arose the practical idea of grab-sharing.

"Give us more pay and charge it to the public," was the slogan of the strong unions.* And here and there this selfish policy worked successfully.

In charging it to the public, it was charged to the great mass of unorganized labor and of weakly organized labor.
These workers actually paid the increased wages of their stronger brothers who were members of unions that were labor monopolies.