" What impresses them is not so much the fact that
the employer owns the employment opportunities but that he possesses a
high degree of bargaining advantage over them. Viewing the situation as
bargainers, they are forced to give their best attention to the menaces
they encounter as bargainers, namely, to the competitive menaces; for on
these the employer's own advantage as a bargainer rests. Their impulse
is therefore not to suppress the employer, but to suppress those
competitive menaces, be they convict labor, foreign labor, "green" or
untrained workers working on machines, and so forth. To do so they feel
they must organize into a union and engage in a "class struggle" against
the employer.
It is the employer's purpose to bring in ever lower and lower levels in
competition among laborers and depress wages; it is the purpose of the
union to eliminate those lower levels and to make them stay eliminated.
That brings the union men face to face with the whole matter of
industrial control. They have no assurance that the employer will not
get the best of them in bargaining unless they themselves possess enough
control over the shop and the trade to check him.
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