284 The High Cost of Strikes

admitted objection to the Open Shop in that it would guarantee the workers against any discrimination merely because they joined, belonged to, or formed a trade union. It would merely mean that the trade union would have to seek its membership on the basis of actual service instead of on the basis of force.
   From the public point of view such a basis of labor relationship would by these very facts go far towards curtailing the power of great industry-wide labor monopolies whose ambitions for greater power and whose feuds to control that power have been the cause of most of our most costly strikes.
   Such a principle of course offers only the fundamental basis of labor relationship—it is of course only the beginning of an attempt towards solution of the strike and general labor problem as they have developed under organized labor domination. Public interest may require in addition the dissolution of certain great labor monopolies which threaten that interest. Both labor’s interest and public interest may require a minimum living wage law—above which workers will be paid in proportion to their ability and ambition to take the place of the present union system of protecting the poorer worker by handicapping the better. Public and labor and employer interest unquestionably demand provisions for making both labor and employer Eve up to their contracts,