So he cuts the price of labour and out you go.
But you mustn't blame him, poor devil. He can't help it. Wages always
come down when two men are after the same job. That's the fault of
competition, not of the man who cuts the price."
"But wyges don't come down where there's a union," the objection was
made.
"And there you are again, right on the head. The union cheeks
competition among the labourers, but makes it harder where there are no
unions. There's where your cheap labour of Whitechapel comes in. They're
unskilled, and have no unions, and cut each other's throats, and ours in
the bargain, if we don't belong to a strong union."
Without going further into the argument, this man on the Mile End Waste
pointed the moral that when two men were after the one job wages were
bound to fall. Had he gone deeper into the matter, he would have found
that even the union, say twenty thousand strong, could not hold up wages
if twenty thousand idle men were trying to displace the union men. This
is admirably instanced, just now, by the return and disbandment of the
soldiers from South Africa. They find themselves, by tens of thousands,
in desperate straits in the army of the unemployed.
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