of making their products scarce and dear.

_When the Probable Results of a Strike afford an Unfair Standard of
Wages._--Where monopolies exist and trade unions rely on violence in
carrying their point, it would not be fair to establish a permanent
rule of wages based on the amounts that strikes so conducted secure.
Such strikes depend for success on the violent exclusion of non-union
men; and actually to give permanence to rates so gained would be to
fasten on the majority of workers the disabilities under which they
now labor, and to perpetuate the gains of a twofold monopoly. On the
other hand, if the court should make its award conform to the probable
result of a strike which should be general in the trade, but should
not resort to any violence, the procedure would be natural and would
base itself, in an unconscious way, on the true standard of wages.
Such a general strike, by its mere magnitude, would preclude the
possibility of any immediate filling of the vacated places by men at
the time out of employment; and yet the fact that non-union men were
not forcibly kept out of the trade would be an all-important feature
of the situation. If, when no strikes were pending, men could gain
admission to this field, there would be no true monopoly on the men's
side. The rule of giving, by arbitration, what a strike would secure
would remove the chance of cutting down the rate to that which
prevails in the more ill-paid employments, and would insure to the men
the rate that marginal workers in actual employment get plus the two
additional amounts spoken of at the beginning of the preceding
chapter. The marginal product of labor plus an amount for personal
superiority plus an amount for good organization would be the standard
to which wages in favored employments would conform; and it is as
nearly normal as any practicable standard would be. A free application
of it would reduce the wages of unions that thrive by the use of force
and would be opposed by such unions. If it were adopted, there is a
prospect that the awards would be rejected by the men until hard
experience should teach them to relinquish gains secured by violence.
Yet a tribunal that should adopt this standard would allow workmen to
retain every advantage that organization can afford without a
violation of the criminal law. Its guide in making awards would be the
pay which the best unions lawfully get in trades akin to the one in
whose case they were acting.