ABSTRACT
Since "imperfect competition," like "monopoly" and "syndicalism," has a pejorative meaning in conventional economics, its mention at the outset of any discussion of trade unionism or collective bargaining arouses immediate suspicion of antiunion, if not antilabor, bias. Economists friendly to the union movement, we know, deny the existence of labor monopoly1at the same time that they credit collective bargaining with raising wage rates. (Their opponents are sometimes guilty of the opposite inconsistency, in accusing unions simultaneously of labor monopoly and of ineffectiveness in raising wages!) The question is worth examination in some detail.
