§ 10. Picketing and the boycott. Picketing by strikers or their friends is intercepting and accosting all persons ap proaching or leaving the place of work, to inform them of conditions and to dissuade them from working there. When peaceable means fail, often there is recourse to violence both against the employer and his property and against non-strik ing workers. Indeed, many persons declare that peaceable picketing is impossible, and it surely is difficult to attain in view of the temptations of human nature under the circum stances.
Almost always connected with a strike is the practice of the boycott, which is a combination of wage-earners to cut off an employer (or group of employers) from business dealings. The boycott is found in varying forms and degrees, broadly distinguished as simple and compound boycott. In simple boycott only persons directly interested in the trade dispute refuse to deal with the boycotted person. The question arises as to who are to be deemed directly interested, whether only the actual strikers in a particular establishment are included, or whether organized workers in sympathy with them are in cluded. The latter case is presented when an "unfair" list is published in labor journals. It seems that only the former case is a really simple boycott. The use of the simple boy cott, the refusal of a person, or even of a conspiring group of persons, to deal with a person with whom they have an industrial dispute, appears to be a part of the elementary rights of personal liberty. Beyond that point the boycott is compound in varying degrees. It is the compound form that is usually referred to in discussion and in court deci sions on the subject. It is the compound boycott that has been described as "a combination to harm one person by coercing others to harm him." The compound boycott, as experi ence shows, has moral limits as well as legal limits. It is doubtful whether the boycott can be extended at all beyond the first degree of personal relations without becoming anti social, whether it is the weapon of organized workers or of organized wealth. The endless-chain boycott, a measure of excommunication without limit, pronounced against an of fending employer, non-union workers, and every one in any way befriending them, is an effort to drag every one else into a dispute that is primarily a private matter.
§ 11. Competitive aspect of organisation and particular wages. The crucial economic problem in connection with trade-unions is not as to their methods (that being rather a political problem) but as to their effect upon wages. There must be distinguished two questions: first, as to the influence of organization upon particular wages, and primarily upon the wages of organized labor; and, next, as to their influence upon the general level of wages.
As to the first, it may be seen that the wages of workers who are organized are generally (though not always) higher than those of unorganized workers in the same trades and neighborhoods. An English trade-unionist, Trent, says; "Where there are no unions wages should be lower. This is exactly the case." And he quotes : "Wherever we find union principles ignored, a low rate of wages prevails, and the reverse where organization is perfect." (1) But he later explains in part this difference: "The union men are the best workmen and often employers pay a man more than union wages. This is not surprising, as no man can be a union carpenter unless he be in good health, have worked a certain number of years at his trade, be a good workman, of steady habits and good moral character." If this be true, as doubtless it is to some degree in many trades and places, it is in accordance with competitive principles that, as the elite of the trade, the organized laborers should get higher wages than those outside the unions. (2) Moreover. the unions exist mainly in the more populous places, where costs of living as well as wages range higher than in the small towns and in the rural districts. A comparison merely of wages in money in such cases is misleading as to the con ditions of real income. (3) Further, a higher standard of output prevails in the cities where organization is greatest, and older men and the less efficient, who are unable to "keep up the pace," drift away into unorganized shops or to villages where no standard union rate is in force. (4) As far as unions help to develop the intelligence and promote the sobriety and efficiency of their members, they are a positive economic force making for higher wages. (5) Organization may help to raise particular wages, inasmuch as it helps to restore to the laborers a truer equality in the making of the wage contract, by creating two-sided competi tion.