More than 90 million men and women in the United States work in the private sector of the economy, in for-profit enterprises. They are embedded in the "employment relation"-an arrangement which orients management and employees to coordinating their labor in service of economic production. It is a relation in which cooperation and conflict historically have become deeply intertwined. On the one hand, management and employees have developed ways to accommodate the needs and interests of each other in times both of prosperity and adversity. On the other hand, they frequently have struggled with each other over the past two hundred years to define the terms-wages, conditions, and job security-of the employment relation. Since the 1970s, these contradictory tendencies have only intensified. While management now is making unprecedented efforts to secure the willing cooperation of employees, tens of millions of jobs have been destroyed and replaced, if at all, by positions much inferior in wages and security. This "restructuring" of the employment relation has yielded important competitive gains for the U.S. economy, but enormous dislocation and suffering as well. Perhaps no other aspect of business ethics is now so germane to Christian belief and practice as the quality of relationship between management and employees. It is here that the raw forces of the global market and the more subtle currents of power relations within corporations have tangible impacts upon millions of lives. The argument, in summary         This study seeks to explain how the employment relation in modern business enterprises might be covenantal. Because I aspire to a Christian realism which avoids both the easy optimism of managerial ideology as well as the dismissive pessimism of radical critics, I focus upon what is perhaps the most intractable issue: the long struggle by management to run their enterprises as it sees fit, as opposed by the efforts of employees to achieve a collective voice through unions. To interpret this often conflicted history, I use another history, of God's efforts to sustain covenantal relations with Israel and the followers of Jesus. I connect these two histories by developing a theory of what it means to covenant within business enterprises as networks of functional interdependence.         According to my model, the occasion for covenanting arises when two parties decide to cope with the durable or ineradicable contingencies they present to each other by making durable commitments. To covenant, I suggest, is to cope with durable contingencies by making enduring commitments, just as God in the Biblical narratives copes with durable human contingencies by making durable commitments. Extended to the employment relation, covenanting is a process for creating a community of mutual accountability by engaging the wills of management and employees in the making and fulfilling of commitments oriented to shared goals and self-restraint in the use of power. As will be seen, covenanting seen as a process is a uniquely appropriate vehicle for interpreting the actions of management and employees who, being constituted of will and spirit, present ineradicable contingencies to each other. The history of management-labor relations yields a succession of strategies and tactics through which both sides have sought to bend each other to their will. . . .         I aspire here to a Christian realism which hews a middle way between the optimism of those ethicists who think that management alone can define and achieve genuine cooperation and moral community within their firms, and the pessimism of dissenting voices who believe that management can achieve nothing of the sort. As this chronological narrative makes clear, the rudiments of covenanting have become evident not in a steady evolutionary march from conflict to cooperation, but in a turbulent and tragic intertwining of achievement with failure.