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122 Economics in One Lessonhim? And as long as this situation exists, there will be a tendency foremployers to bid workers up to their full economic worth.All this does not mean that unions can serve no useful or legitimatefunction. The central function they can serve is to assure that allof their members get the true market value of their services.For the competition of workers for jobs, and of employers forworkers, does not work perfectly. Neither individual workers nor individualemployers are likely to be fully informed concerning the conditionsof the labor market. An individual worker, without the help of aunion or a knowledge of “union rates,” may not know the true marketvalue of his services to an employer. And he is, individually, in a muchweaker bargaining position. Mistakes of judgment are far more costlyto him than to an employer. If an employer mistakenly refuses to hirea man from whose services he might have profited, he merely loses thenet profit he might have made from employing that one man; and hemay employ a hundred or a thousand men. But if a worker mistakenlyrefuses a job in the belief that he can easily get another that will payhim more, the error may cost him dearly. His whole means of livelihoodis involved. Not only may he fail promptly to find another joboffering more; he may fail for a time to find another job offeringremotely as much. And time may be the essence of his problem,because he and his family must eat. So he may be tempted to take awage that he knows to be below his “real worth” rather than face theserisks. When an employer’s workers deal with him as a body, however,and set a known “standard wage” for a given class of work, they mayhelp to equalize bargaining power and the risks involved in mistakes.But it is easy, as experience has proved, for unions, particularlywith the help of one-sided labor legislation which puts compulsionssolely on employers, to go beyond their legitimate functions, to actirresponsibly, and to embrace shortsighted and antisocial policies.They do this, for example, whenever they seek to fix the wages oftheir members above their real market worth. Such an attempt alwaysbrings about unemployment. The arrangement can be made to stick,in fact, only by some form of intimidation or coercion.