← Back to context

Comment by micromacrofoot

1 day ago

Yeah it's total horseshit, to be frank.

Worker protections have almost never been granted by the profiteers... not child labor laws, not weekends, not overtime, not safety regulations, not minimum wage, not workers comp... the working class is not what it is today because of "sharing prosperity" and there's been a lot of prosperity — it's all a series of fights.

This is all well known, but I recently visited an old coal mine in Pennsylvania, and much of the tour was talking about the labor conditions, and the generational "trap" of working there. If a worker died, the family had little time to leave the company-provided house without providing someone to work. What often happened is that one of the children would work to maintain the household.

>[0]the "rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country."

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1902_anthracite_coal_strike