Supply and Demand - cont.

 

This tension between limiting the supply of skilled labor and maintaining decent wages for an ever-growing supply of workers has been a constant thread of union history. It still plays a critical role today in understanding the pressures of the global economy, as workers in the global North try to retain their wage standards in the face of an easily accessible, much poorer work force in the global South.

 

Most early white settlers of what we now call the United States were individual farmers, and most craft or industrial enterprises were small. The one exception was shipping. Sailors, bound together by close quart ers and frequently brutal employers,
instinctively understood labor solidarity. What owners and captains called mutinies were
what we would call a strike. In fact, the very word is traced to Atlantic sailors. When the sails are furled, they are struck. When a group of sailors refused to work, they called out, “strike the sails.” The word eventually applied to any labor stoppage.

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