iness can wait for it,
but it can seldom do this; and a strike that runs through a subgroup
presents to employers the alternative of winning the workers by
concessions or allowing their business to stop. If it stops, it
becomes a question of endurance between the employer and the
employees, in which the employer has the advantage so long as the
public does not interfere. We shall recur to this condition when we
study the effectiveness of strikes and boycotts under various
conditions. Under all three of the conditions we have just described,
the static standard of wages--the final productivity of social
labor--still exists; and the actual pay of labor tends toward it, but
differs from it by varying amounts, according as labor is unorganized,
locally organized, or organized throughout a subgroup. In the first
case the worker may get materially less than the standard amount; in
the second case he may get something closely approaching it; and in
the third case, for reasons to which we shall later give attention, he
may be able to get the full amount and somewhat more. A particular
employment which is strongly organized and which makes the utmost use
of its organization is often able to carry the pay of its employees to
a level that is distinctly above that set by the productive power of
_marginal social_ labor. Nevertheless, the amount of this overplus
which the favored worker gets is limited, and the standard fixed by
marginal productivity is one on which the pay of these workers and of
all others depends, though it may not coincide with it.

_The Power of a Universal Organization of Labor._--In the days when
the wages fund theory held sway it was believed that organization
could not materially advance the interests of labor as a whole, since
it could not add anything to the fund which was destined in any case
to be divided among the laborers. Now that another theory of wages is
generally held, it is still clear that what organization can do for
the entire working class is limited. By no possibility can it insure a
rate of pay that will permanently exceed the product of labor, since
employers would then be interested in reducing the number of their
workmen and so raising their product _per capita_ to the level of
their pay. This would result in a large force of idle laborers, whose
competition would have its depressing effect on the labor market. Up
to the natural limit set by the specific product of labor a universal
org