Eddy, Arthur Jerome: The new competition: an examination of the conditions underlying the radical change that is taking place in the commercial and industrial world ; the change from a competitive to a cooperative basis (New York [u.a.], 1912)

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THE NEW COMPETITION

The firemen of all the railroads in the country are
banded together, and the engineers of all the roads are in a
brotherhood, but the fireman and the engineer who ride in
the same cab are not united; in fact, their unions are neces-
sarily more or less antagonistic; one may support the other
in a demand for higher wages and a threat to strike, but
only as a matter of policy.
Ask a brakeman or a switchman what he thinks of the
demand of the engineers for increased pay,1 and he will
give you his opinion in language hardly fit for publication,
but his union will keep silent, because it expects to put in
its own demand later on, when, in turn, the engineers will
be expected to lend their support.
It is needless to say a fireman on a road in California
has nothing in common with a fireman on a road in Maine;
the work is not the same, the fuel is not the same, the cost
of living is not the same, yet the two are linked together
each as against not only the company that employs him,
but against the engineer and conductor who run the train
on which he fires. His wages and conditions of employ-
ment are fixed by men he never sees, who live in States
thousands of miles from where he lives; he works when
they tell him to, strikes when they tell him to, and accord-
ingly as he is told he will or will not take his engineer’s
place if the latter strikes for better wages.

V
The condition is fundamentally unsound, and the
stronger the unions become the more clearly do they dem-
onstrate the weakness of the theory of combination by ag-
gregation.
Just as was found in discussing industrial combina-
1 Formulated, April, 1912.