Collective Choice at Work

"At one time or another, most of you have seen in the street the warning sign "Danger: Men at Work." None of you have seen a danger sign warning "Danger: Collective Choice at Work." This is probably a great mistake, for collective choice has an immense destructive potential, ranging from corrosion to explosion, and the fiction that the social contract makes it all right and all benign is at best a half truth and at least a half lie. The present article looks at what tends to happen when collective choice is at work where men are at work and are paid wages for it."