That's the fault of competition, not of the man who cuts the price." "But wyges don't come down where there's a union," the objection was made.
"And there you are again, right on the head.

The union cheeks competition among the labourers, but makes it harder where there are no unions.

There's where your cheap labour of Whitechapel comes in.

They're unskilled, and have no unions, and cut each other's throats, and ours in the bargain, if we don't belong to a strong union." Without going further into the argument, this man on the Mile End Waste pointed the moral that when two men were after the one job wages were bound to fall.

Had he gone deeper into the matter, he would have found that even the union, say twenty thousand strong, could not hold up wages if twenty thousand idle men were trying to displace the union men.