126 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



tended to favour ; and the pull that they are able to exert upon the 

 distribution of the price paid by the consumer for coal is certainly not 

 less than that exerted by the miners to-day. And this change is significant 

 of the general change in the competitive position of different wage-earning 

 groups. All now are organised, or provided by the Government with 

 equivalent protection ; all are able to set and hold rates of wages, as 

 firmly as the minority of well-organised trades were able to hold them 

 before the war. Partial and sporadic monopoUstic organisation has been 

 displaced by universal control. Two consequences follow. First, it is 

 no longer possible for well-organised trades, merely by virtue of their 

 trade union organisation, to secure differential gains at the expense of 

 unorganised or ill-organised groups with whom they co-operate ; or, if 

 it is still possible, at any rate it is more difficult. In the second place, 

 influences upon wages, that were formerly counteracted by trade union 

 organisation, have now free play. Organisation and control, having 

 been extended generally, no longer differentiate groups, so that their 

 influence, if not yet eliminated, is very much reduced. 



From this point of view the intervention of the State, in establishing 

 Trade Boards and Agricultural Wages Boards and in other ways, and the 

 contemporary extension of unionism to hitherto unorganised trades takes 

 on a rather different aspect from that which Mr. and Mrs. "Webb put upon 

 it. They represented it rather as an extension to the rest of industry of 

 the principle of trade union control and of the benefits that they had 

 shown to follow from trade union organisation. This, of course, it was ; 

 but it was at the same time a necessary corrective of trade union influence. 

 So long as only a part of the field of wage-employment is covered by 

 trade union organisation, the benefits secured by trade unionists may in 

 part be at the expense of the workpeople in the unorganised part of the 

 field ; so far as those benefits are not the return to increased efficiency 

 due to union pressure, they will almost certainly be in part at the expense 

 of other wage-earners. To prevent this kind of horizontal redistribution, 

 it is necessary to put all wage-earners on an equality in respect of 

 organisation for wage-bargaining ; it will never be possible to secure 

 complete equality in this respect, but the changes of the last twenty 

 years have eliminated the obvious inequality, and thereby eliminated a 

 great part of the danger. 



Trade union organisation is, however, not the only element of mono- 

 poly or other advantage differentiating different occupational groups. 

 The extension of union organisation, therefore, or some effective substi- 

 tute for it, to the support of wages throughout the whole of industry, 

 does not suflSice to put occupations upon an equality. Rather its effect 

 is to enhance the influence upon distribution of other factors making 

 for inequality, more particularly of those elements of bargaining-advantage, 

 that are inherent in the nature of different industries, but were obstructed 

 or outweighed in the past by the greater influence of unequal union 

 organisation. The second consequence of general control is, therefore, 

 the release of influences upon wages which were formerly prevented from 

 exercising their full potential effect. In this release is, I think, to be 

 found a partial explanation of the changed relations which wages in 

 different industries bear to one another since the war. It might have 



