They had surrounded one of their number, a pleasant-faced man of thirty, and were giving it to him rather heatedly. He's more interested in them than in yours, and he can't see them starve. So he cuts the price of labor and out you go. But you mustn't blame him, poor devil. He can't help it.
Wages always come down when two men are after the same job.
Mile End Road. The union checks competition among the laborers, but makes it harder where there are no unions. There's where your cheap labor of Whitechapel comes in. Without going further into the argument, this man on the Mile End Waste pointed the moral that when two men were after the one job wages were bound to fall. Had he gone deeper into the matter, he would have found that even the union, say twenty thousand strong, could not hold up wages if twenty thousand idle men were trying to displace the union men.