Sec. 8. #Strikes in labor disputes.# A strike is a concerted stopping of work by a group of employees to enforce a demand upon the employer.  A lockout is an employer’s closing of his shop because of a disagreement with his employees.  The strike is, in its direct and indirect, immediate and ultimate, effects the most important weapon of the organized wage-earners in their relations with their employers.  To newly organized laborers the union appeals mainly as an instrument for striking, for threatening the employer, or for making him suffer to compel him to accede to their demands.  The effectiveness of a strike lies in the loss it threatens or occasions in the stopping of machinery, the ruin of materials, the loss of custom, and the failure to complete contracts that have been undertaken.

The employers will often, to break a strike, pay to others for a time more than the current rate of wages.  The success of the strikers being dependent on their ability to keep the employer from filling their places, their energies are bent upon that end.  The losses that strikes cause to workers in stoppage of wages, to employers and investors in destruction of plant and in suspension of profits, and to the public in the interruption of business, aggregate an enormous sum.  The direct losses to employers and strikers in the 20 years between 1881 and 1900 have been estimated to have been nearly $500,000,000, a large sum, but amounting to less than 1 per cent of the wage-earners’ incomes.  It is, however, impossible to estimate at all exactly losses that in many cases are indirect and intangible.  The strikers are concerned in each case not with the balance of total losses and total gains to society as a whole, but with the net gain that they expect to accrue in the long run to themselves.  Viewed in this way it is true that there are various indirect benefits in strikes that are not easily calculable, particularly the advances of wages made by employers to avoid strikes which they know will otherwise occur.  In regard to the wisdom of any contemplated strike, opinion is always somewhat divided, as it is in regard to the value of strikes in general.

Sec. 9. #Frequency and causes of strikes#.  Strikes were relatively decreasing in number from 1880 to 1900, but from 1901 to 1905 the annual average was more than twice as large as in the preceding decade.  On the whole, strikes have been more numerous in periods of business prosperity when there was a better chance to get concessions from the employers.  But they occur also in the periods following crises, when the workers seek to minimize cuts in wages and to prevent the depression of working conditions.  More broadly viewed, strikes appear to accompany readjustments to dynamic conditions.  As wages as a rule rise more slowly than general prices,[5] it was to be expected that the period since 1900, in which the general price level was rising at the rate of about 3 per cent a year, should have been marked by increasing resort to strikes.