To
ARNOLD AND EDITH PLANT

ECONOMICS TEACHES that there is but one method available to raise wage rates for all those eager to earn wages, viz., to increase the per-head quota of capital invested and thereby the marginal productivity of labor.

PART OF THIS ESSAY was included in papers read to the Economic Society of South Africa at Cape Town on the 18th September, 1928, and to Section “F” of the British Association at Johannesburg on the 2nd August, 1929. The study on which it is based arose out of doubts as to the validity of much current teaching on the subject which had been suggested in the lectures of Professor Edwin Cannan. My indebtedness to his teaching and methods must be obvious.

THE OBJECT of this essay is to controvert the suggestions typical of most modern economic text-books,

(a) that there is some portion of the normal remuneration of labor which, in the absence of collective bargaining by labor is, or can be, transferred to the remuneration of other factors of production owing to labor’s “disadvantage in bargaining”; or

Alison, Sir Archibald, 29

Anti-sweating movements, 74, 141

Apprenticeship, 33, 34, 41, 42

Arbitration, 102-04, 141

Aristocracy of Industry, 33, 34

Artisans and Machinery, Select Committee on, 1824, 50, 138

At the expense of, meaning of the phrase, 114

Auction, price in, 85

Bargaining power, 21, 62, 80, 101-02, 105

Barter, 80, 91, 93-5

The Strike-Threat System

The

Strike-Threat

System

THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES
OF COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

W. H. Hutt

The Ludwig von Mises Institute
Auburn, Alabama
2009