The Wealth of Nations (1776) - An Excerpt from Chapter 8 of Vol. 1
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by Adam Smith
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What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract
usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the
same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as
possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter
in order to lower the wages of labour.
It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon
all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the
other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number,
can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least
does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen.
We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work;
but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can
hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant,
though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or
two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not
subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without
employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as
his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though
frequently of those of workmen. BUT WHOEVER IMAGINES, UPON THIS ACCOUNT, THAT
MASTERS RARELY COMBINE, IS AS IGNORANT OF THE WORLD AS OF THE SUBJECT. 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. TO
VIOLATE THIS COMBINATION IS EVERYWHERE A MOST UNPOPULAR ACTION, AND A SORT OF
REPROACH TO A MASTER AMONG HIS NEIGHBOURS AND EQUALS. WE SELDOM, INDEED, HEAR
OF THIS COMBINATION, BECAUSE IT IS THE USUAL, AND ONE MAY SAY, THE NATURAL
STATE OF THINGS, WHICH NOBODY EVER HEARS OF. 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, till the
moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without
resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other
people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary
defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any
provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of
their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of
provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work.
But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always
abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they
have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most
shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly
and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their
masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters upon
these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and 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 combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen,
accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those
tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil
magistrate, partly from the necessity superior steadiness of the masters,
partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of
submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but
the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders.
