Flushed with confidence at the sight of their serried phalanxes and
extending lines, the unionists do like most people invested with
unwonted power; they aim at more than is possible or just. They fancy
that they can put the screw on the community, almost without limit. But
they will soon find out their mistake. They will learn it from those
very things which are filling the world with alarm--the extension of
unionism, and the multiplication of strikes. The builder strikes against
the rest of the community, including the baker, then the baker strikes
against the builder and the collier strikes against them both. At first
the associated trades seem to have it all their own way. But the other
trades learn the secret of association. Everybody strikes against
everybody else, the price of all articles rises as much as anybody's
wages, and thus when the wheel has come full circle, nobody is much the
gainer. In fact long before the wheel has come full circle the futility
of a universal strike will be manifest to all. The world sees before it
a terrible future of unionism ever increasing in power and tyranny, but
it is more likely that in a few years unionism as an instrument for
forcing up wages will have ceased to exist. In the meantime the working
classes will have impressed upon themselves by a practical experiment
upon the grandest scale and of the most decisive kind the fact that they
are consumers as well as producers, payers of wages as well as receivers
of wages, members of a community as well as workingmen.
The unionists will learn also after a few trials that the community
cannot easily be cornered, at least that it cannot easily be cornered
more than once by unions any more than by gold rings at New York or pork
rings at Chicago. It may apparently succumb once being unable to do
without its bread or its newspapers or to stop buildings already
contracted for and commenced, but it instinctively prepares to defend
itself against a repetition of the operation. It limits consumption or
invents new modes of production, improves machinery, encourages non
union men, calls in foreigners, women, Chinese. In the end the corner
results in loss. Cornering on the part of workingmen is not a bit worse
than cornering on the part of great financiers; in both cases alike it
is as odious as anything can be, which is not actually criminal; but
depend upon it a bad time is coming for corners of all kinds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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