Читать книгу Inequality and the Labor Market - Группа авторов - Страница 13

Typically there is some, but limited, competition in the labor market, but it is competition that is insufficient to achieve anything approximating what would emerge in a truly competitive marketplace. But employers often do not like even this limited competition, because even some competition means that wages are higher than they would be with no competition. Thus, firms sometimes collude to not compete; and that collusion drives down wages. The incentives for firms to do this—if they can get away with it—are obvious: collusion has been a feature of capitalism from the start. As Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations, “Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.… Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy” (Smith 1776, book 1, chap. 8).

Even then, Smith had observed an asymmetry not only in bargaining power, but also in capitalists’ response to workers’ attempts to redress the balance. When workers combine their forces, “the masters … never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen” (Smith 1776, book 1, chap. 8). This stance, of course, was markedly different from capitalists’ own behavior—not only in labor markets, but elsewhere, too. As Smith put it in one of his most famous statements, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” (book 1, chap. 10). This issue is central: to redress the natural imbalance of bargaining power, workers have to band together and engage in collective bargaining. Unions are critical. But it is precisely because unions have been somewhat successful in redressing the imbalance that employers have worked so hard to suppress them, as I comment later in this introduction.