But the manufacturer's emancipation from the middleman need not always
lead to trade agreements. In the shoe industry this process did not do
away with competition. In other industries such an emancipation was
identical with the coming in of the "trust," or a combination of
competing manufacturers into a monopoly. As soon as the "trust" becomes
practically the sole employer of labor in an industry, the relations
between labor and capital are thrown almost invariably back into the
state of affairs which characterized the merchant-capitalist system at
its worst, but with one important difference. Whereas under the
merchant-capitalist system the employer was _obliged_ to press down on
wages and fight unionism to death owing to cut-throat competition, the
"trust," its strength supreme in both commodity and labor market, can do
so and usually does so _of free choice_.
The character of the labor struggle has been influenced by cyclical
changes in industry as much as by the permanent changes in the
organization of industry and market. In fact, whereas reaction to the
latter has generally been slow and noticeable only over long periods of
time, with a turn in the business cycle, the labor movement reacted
surely and instantaneously.
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