§ 3. (_c_) The more or less complete control of the capital engaged in an industry, and of the market, involves an enormous power over the labour engaged in that industry. So long as competition survives, the employee or group of employees are able to obtain wages and other terms of employment determined in some measure by the conflicting interests of different employers. But when there is only one employer, the Trust, the workman who seeks employment has no option but to accept the terms offered by the Trust. His only alternative is to abandon the use of the special skill of his trade and to enter the ever-swollen unskilled labour market. This applies with special force to factory employees who have acquired great skill by incessant practice in some narrow routine of machine-tending. The average employee in a highly-elaborated modern factory is on the whole less competent than any other worker to transfer his labour-power without loss to another kind of work.[141] Now, as we have seen, it is precisely in these manufactures that many of the strongest Trusts spring up. The Standard Oil Company or the Linseed Oil Trust are the owners of their employees almost to the same extent as they are owners of their mills and machinery, so subservient has modern labour become to the fixed capital under which it works. It has been claimed as one of the advantages of a Trust that the economies attending its working enable it to pay wages higher than the market rate. There can be no question as to the ability of the stronger Trusts to pay high wages. But there is no power to compel them to do so, and it would be pure hypocrisy to pretend that the interests of the labourers formed any part of the motive which led a body of keen business men to acquire a monopoly. One of the special economies which a large capital possesses over a small, and which a Trust possesses _par excellence_, is the power of making advantageous bargains with its employees. It is possible that a firm like the Standard Oil Trust may to some limited extent practise a cheap philanthropy of profit-sharing in order to deceive the public into supposing that its huge profits enrich many instead of few. But there is no evidence that the employees of a Trust have gained in any way from the economies of industrial monopoly, nor, as we see, is there any _à priori_ likelihood they should so gain.[142]