Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/193

 NUMBER AS DETERMINING FORM OF GROUP l8l

builders are in constant conflict with the carpenters, the tinmen with the blacksmiths, the boilermakers with the metal-workers, the masons with the roofers, as to which of them has a right to do a certain piece of work. Each trade quits work at once when it believes that another trade has invaded its rightful province. The insoluble contradiction in this case is that definite bound- aries are assumed for subjective rights in objects which in their nature are in perpetual flux. Such conflicts between laborers have frequently very seriously disturbed their status as related to employers. The employer has a moral advantage so soon as his workmen strike on account of their differences with each other, and thus cause him immeasurable loss, and it is furthermore in his power to constrain at will each separate trade by the threat of employing another trade to do the work in question. The economic interest of each trade in preventing the transfer of the work rests upon the fear that the competing laborer may do it cheaper, and thus eventually depress the standard of wages for this work. It is consequently proposed, as the one possible solution, that the trade organizations in conference with the associated employers should set a standard of wages for each distinct kind of work, and then leave it to the employers to decide which class of laborers they will employ for the work in hand. In that case the excluded trade need not fear any harm to its economic interest in principle. Through the objectification of the matter in controversy, the employer loses the advantage in respect to depression of wages, and the playing off of the two parties against each other, although he retains the choice between the different bodies of workmen. The former indefi- niteness between the personal and the material element is thus differentiated, and while in respect to the first the employer is still in the situation of the tertius gaudens, the objective fixation of the second has taken from this situation the chances for its exploitation.

Many of the species of conflict referred to here, and in the next formation, must have co-operated in the case of the secular powers of the Middle Ages, to produce or to increase the power of the mediaeval church. In the presence of the perpetual dis-