2. _Its next aim is to use collective in the place of individual bargaining, to force as much as the competitive wage, and more if possible._ The term collective bargaining has been much used to describe bargaining between a group of labor leaders, the delegated representatives of the workingmen, and a group of employers or directors. It is sometimes claimed that all the trade-union seeks is to put the workman on an equality with the employer in bargaining, enabling him to get all he would if competition were free on both sides. It is said that organized labor simply prevents the employer from following the maxim of Napoleon to "divide and conquer," from meeting his employees one by one and forcing his own terms upon them. But the most effective argument in organizing the trade-union is that it forces a higher wage, more than the market would warrant. It is sometimes assumed by labor leaders that competitive wages would be very low, almost starvation wages, and anything above that level is credited to the work of the union; while in other cases where the wages are already large, the purpose frankly avowed is to limit the labor supply in the particular trade and to force a monopoly wage by any means possible. One's opinion of trade-unions is likely to differ according as they work in one or the other of these ways. The impartial onlooker sympathizes with the efforts of the trade-unions in so far as they serve merely to put the workers on an equality with the employers in bargaining. The public wants to see "fair play," and up to a certain point the union is merely a device to get fair play. But if the union is a device to defeat competition, to force artificially high wages, it will be judged differently. The public readily sees that if the unions force more than a fair and open market affords, it is rarely at the expense of the employer; that in the long run it is at the expense of the purchasing public itself, including the unprivileged workmen shut out from the monopoly of labor. [Sidenote: The issue of the closed shop vs. the open shop]