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Rh and workmen in Great Britain would not be prepared for such measures, involving as they would the surrender by those directly concerned of their freedom to arrange these matters by voluntary agreement or by a trial of strength. Without the provision of some alternative by the state, it would be impossible in a free country to prohibit altogether the termination of labour contracts by collective agreement among work-people or employers.

The law, however, may and does restrict or prohibit the use of some of the methods of promoting or carrying on strikes which interfere with the liberty of other labourers, or inflict a wrong on employers, or injuriously affect the public interest.

The question of the effectiveness or otherwise of strikes and lock-outs for the purpose of influencing the conditions of employment is part of the wider question of the economic effect of combinations, the strike or lock-out being only one of many methods adopted by combinations of workmen or employers to enforce their demands. (This matter is discussed in the article .) Apart, however, from the question of the extent of the immediate advantage, if any, which one party or the other is able to obtain from a stoppage, we have to consider generally the economic effects of strikes and lock-outs to the community as a whole. Stoppages of work are in their nature wasteful. Time, which might be employed in work yielding wages to the work-people and profits to the employers, is lost never to be recovered, while many forms of fixed capital deteriorate during idleness. In attempting, however, to estimate the utility or disadvantage of strikes and lock-outs, whether to the parties themselves or to the industrial community as a whole, it is insufficient to take into account the value of the wages and profits foregone during the stoppage, and to balance these against the gains made by one party or the other. Attempts have often been made to measure the loss or gain due to strikes in this way, but even as applied to particular stoppages, looked at purely from the point of view of one or other of the parties involved, the method is unsatisfactory. On the one hand, the time and work apparently lost may be afterwards partially recouped by overtime, or some of the strikers may be replaced by others, or may themselves find work elsewhere, so that the actual interruption of production may be less than would appear from the magnitude of the dispute. On the other hand, the total loss due to the stoppage may be augmented by the diversion of trade for a longer or shorter period after the resumption of work. Again, the ultimate effect of the forced concession of excessive demands may be damaging instead of advantageous to the nominal victors, by contracting the field of employment or by lowering the efficiency of the labour. If, however, the arithmetical computation of the value of the time lost compared with the value of the terms gained is an unsatisfactory test of the benefit or disadvantage of a particular strike to the parties concerned, it is wholly fallacious as a method of estimating the social utility or otherwise of strikes and lock-outs as instruments for effecting changes in the condition of employment. For any satisfactory consideration of this wider question we must look not merely to the actual strike, but to the whole process of free bargaining between employers and organized bodies of work-people, of which, as already shown, the strike may be regarded as merely an untoward incident. The actual cessation of work is a symptom that for the time there is a deadlock, and frequency of such cessations in any trade is a sign of the imperfection of means of negotiation. In many trades in which both employers and workmen are strongly organized various forms of machinery have been brought into existence for the purpose of minimizing the chance of stoppages (see ). But wherever there is free combined negotiation there is always in the background the possibility of combined stoppage. This being understood, the question of the utility of strikes as an industrial method resolves itself into the questions: (1) Whether the process of settling the terms of employment by agreements affecting considerable bodies of work-people and employers is superior to the method of individual settlements of labour contracts, or, at least, whether its advantages are sufficient to outweigh the cost of strikes