The immediate causes of strikes have been changing in relative importance.  In 1881, at the time of the very rapid organization of unions, over 71 per cent of all strikes were directly connected with wage demands (61 per cent for increase and 10 per cent against reduction).  But in 1905 the total for these causes was only 37 per cent, whereas the proportion of strikes for reduction of hours nearly doubled (from 3 to 5 per cent) and the proportion of those concerning recognition of unions and union rules increased fivefold (from 6 to 31 per cent).  Ultimately nearly every demand of the laborers is related to the question of wages; but these figures show that when organization is new this relationship is more immediate, whereas later more effort is directed toward securing the stronger strategic position that comes with recognition of the union.

Sec. 10. #Picketing and the boycott#.  Picketing by strikers or their friends is intercepting and accosting all persons approaching or leaving the place of work, to inform them of conditions and to dissuade them from working there.  When peaceable means fail, often there is recourse to violence both against the employer and his property and against nonstriking workers.  Indeed, many persons declare that peaceable picketing is impossible, and it surely is difficult to attain in view of the temptations of human nature under the circumstances.

Almost always connected with a strike is the practice of the boycott, which is a combination of wage-earners to cut off an employer (or group of employers) from business dealings.  The boycott is found in varying forms and degrees, broadly distinguished as simple and compound-boycott.  In simple boycott only persons directly interested in the trade dispute refuse to deal with the boycotted person.  The question arises as to who are to be deemed directly interested, whether it includes only the actual strikers in a particular establishment, or whether it includes organized workers in sympathy with them.  The latter case is presented when an “unfair” list is published in labor journals.  It seems that only the former case is a really simple boycott.  The use of the simple boycott, the refusal of a person, or even of a conspiring group of persons, to deal with a person with whom they have an industrial dispute, appears to be a part of the elementary rights of personal liberty.  Beyond that point the boycott is compound in varying degrees.[6] It is the compound form which is usually referred to in discussion and in court decisions on the subject.  It is the compound boycott that has been described as “a combination to harm one person by coercing others to harm him.”  The compound boycott, as experience shows, has moral limits as well as legal limits.  It is doubtful whether the boycott can be extended at all beyond the first degree of personal relations without becoming antisocial, whether it is the weapon of organized workers or of organized wealth.  The endless-chain boycott, a measure of excommunication without limit, pronounced against an offending employer, non-union workers, and every one in any way befriending them, is an effort to drag every one else into a dispute that is primarily a private matter.