Tangentially related, there's this copper mining museum in BC (1) in what used to be one of these corporate towns where you lived and died. They do a quick demo of the equipments they used back in the day, in a pre cut hole. Even with your hands on your hears it's painful, teeth chattering - and they don't even really hit the rock.
People working in there weren't wearing any sort of hearing protection and became deaf within months. And after introducing pressured air driven equipment, they were all dying in a few years from silicosis. Until someone added water spraying to precipitate the dust into mud (wherein their issue became to fiddle caked in mud all day long in the dark, which I guess is an improvement over certain death). Which happened years later.
Thinking about the kind of life they had terrorizes me. I don't get how, for the longest time, people were fine with that. I mean no judgement on the workers, they probably didn't have a choice - but the people sending them in probably saw them as kettle.
Makes you think about the sort of progress in worker protection that was made since then. But also this kind of story reveals how people are still ready to profiteer from such deadly practices, if given the opportunity.
Today the leading cause of death is heart disease. In that era it was infectious disease. You could have a cushy job doing numbers work in a city and still die of tuberculosis from being in close quarters. People were fine with it because everything was terrible.
In the century between the 1850s and 1950s we went from not even having radio communications or the germ theory of disease to building nuclear submarines and fiber optic data networks.
Once we had penicillin and cities stopped dumping raw sewage into the water supply, people started to have better options and these kinds of businesses had to improve safety to attract workers.
If you had to choose between the job you have now and the ones they had then, how much more would they have to pay you to get you to choose the latter? More than it costs for the safety equipment, right? So they started installing it.
Then governments passed laws requiring it because politicians are adept at taking credit for good things that were about to happen regardless.
Yeah, the operators of company towns were violent pricks who didn't much like it that workers increasingly had better options than to die in a mine. That didn't change the economics though. Neither did committing violence against them, which was not only already illegal even then but also wildly unpopular.
There's nothing better for workers than a competitive market. What's the boss going to do when the workers have the option to quit and get a better job somewhere else?
Get legislation passed like “right to work”, conspire with other business leaders to suppress worker wages/benefits, make striking illegal, etc etc etc.
"Right to work" is not going to stop anyone from quitting if some other job provides better working conditions.
The only reason you need to strike is if there isn't any other employer offering better terms that you can go work for instead. Otherwise you can just threaten to quit unless they meet your terms and actually do it if they don't.
Conspiracies only work if the market is concentrated enough; if there are ten thousand employers and it's easy to start a new one then you're not going to be able to hold together a secret illegal cartel.
None of those actually work in a competitive market.
The market can de-competitiveize itself through non-compete agreements, intellectual property laws, and other barriers to entry. The competitiveness occurs around the "ruleset", which shifts around according to the regulatory environment.
The government tends to default to supporting strikebreaking(and still generally does in any era, including this one) because industrialists, financiers and politicians share lines of mutual support: legal ownership of intangibles like a corporation acts as an alternative to feudal fiefdoms and warlords, in that it's less destructive and lets complex processes evolve.
Corporations are very effective at putting taxable assets on the books, which allows a more complex state bureaucracy, so politicians end up wanting the support of business for government power and expenditures. Financiers want their thumb on the scale, for the winners they picked to continue winning, rather than to run off and form a competitor. And the industrialists themselves, though they are often at the forefront of the most dramatic reorganizations, tend to get stuck in equilibriums where either they're the evil monopolist, or someone else is. Once you arrive at the equilibrium, the elite players lose their dynamism and are pressured to stay within the existing trends or lose their place.
Thus when the Pinkertons or their modern counterparts come in, the officials shrug and say "business as usual, business as usual". The system convulses when it becomes a riot and property is destroyed because that weakens the whole premise: less capital to deploy, fewer assets to tax, failure to return on investment. And people out of a job, but if they were rioting it may have been a crummy job. It creates a shock that can break the equilibrium and enable a different deployment of labor and capital in a new technological environment. That's essentially why the industrial era has so many short, distinct periods and upheavals within it; the sausage is being made, though it's ugly to witness.
> The market can de-competitiveize itself through non-compete agreements, intellectual property laws, and other barriers to entry. The competitiveness occurs around the "ruleset", which shifts around according to the regulatory environment.
What you're getting at is that market competition can be destroyed through regulatory capture. But now you're making the case for regulatory form and anti-trust rather than some kind of labor laws, which was kind of what I was getting at to begin with.
Trying to regulate an artificial monopoly is a fool's errand, not least because if they have the political influence to capture regulators and retain their monopoly then they can also interfere with the passage or enforcement of anything that benefits workers at their expense. So all efforts should be directed to breaking them into tiny, tiny pieces none of which have enough power to capture the government.
Free market competition rarely develops without regulation and/or government/public oversight.
With no external control businesses tend to form cartels and/or adopt practices and regulations that are more hostile towards both consumers and workers than what governments can come up to.
On average anyway. Of course there markets and goods which are somewhat immune to this and exceptionally incompetent governments which can do significantly more harm than good.
> With no external control businesses tend to form cartels and/or adopt practices and regulations that are more hostile towards both consumers and workers than what governments can come up to.
Cartels are generally a result of government regulation, because they require something to be creating a barrier to entry that prevents new entrants from breaking the cartel.
You can also have cartels enforced by e.g. acts of violence or vandalizing competitors who won't join the cartel, but who claims that non-consensual violence or property damage shouldn't be illegal?
If you encounter an uncompetitive market in practice then you clearly have some kind of a regulatory failure, but the answer in these cases is not to pass more laws to mitigate the consequences of insufficient competition, it's to address whatever is causing the market to be uncompetitive.
> Cartels are generally a result of government regulation,
They are often the result of companies bribing or otherwise coopting the government to enact those regulations.
> You can also have cartels enforced by e.g. acts of violence or vandalizing competitors
Or you could just abuse your dominant position by preventing your suppliers or retailers from doing business with your competitors, outright buying them, running them out of business by temporarily dumping your prices etc. these are all both more effective and more realistic options than outright violence.
> but the answer in these cases is not to pass more laws to mitigate the consequences of insufficient competition,
Having corrupt and incompetent governments leads to bad outcomes. That’s not particularly insightful nor does it automatically discredit any form of regulation.
> it's to address whatever is causing the market to be uncompetitive.
You’re certainly right. Sometimes this can be accomplished by reducing restrictions and sometimes by introducing additional laws. We should also take into account that unregulated markets are hardly ever competitive.
> They are often the result of companies bribing or otherwise coopting the government to enact those regulations.
Which is the thing that does this:
> automatically discredit any form of regulation.
The default assumption is that a proposed regulation benefits powerful interests, because powerful interests are the ones who can have regulations enacted.
That doesn't mean it's a violation of the laws of physics for a regulation to do something good, but if you open the US Code to a random page it's not what you'd expect to find, and if someone proposes a new rule they should be viewed with skepticism.
> Or you could just abuse your dominant position by preventing your suppliers or retailers from doing business with your competitors, outright buying them, running them out of business by temporarily dumping your prices etc. these are all both more effective and more realistic options than outright violence.
These also require the market to already be uncompetitive. If there are a thousand suppliers and retailers, you have to be able to strongarm them all or your competitor can just use any that you can't. If there aren't regulations creating a market barrier to entry then new competitors can form and you have to buy them out for more than they make in the market which in turn is more than their entry cost, but if you do this then it's profitable to keep creating new competitors to make you buy until you run out of money. You can sell at a loss but with low barriers to entry now customers or retailers can go into competition with you just to force you to keep doing that forever and lower their own costs.
Also notably such things have been anti-trust violations for a hundred years or so without requiring any new legislation (and this is still a useful check when some other regulations have caused a market to already be uncompetitive or have high barriers to entry).
> Sometimes this can be accomplished by reducing restrictions and sometimes by introducing additional laws.
But many of the laws proposed to address problems caused by a lack of competition are not even attempts to restore competition. They're commonly attempts to mitigate the damage caused by the lack of it. And these laws typically make it harder rather than easier to actually restore competition, because regulatory overhead favors large conglomerates with legal departments, reduces the flexibility that could allow new challengers to find a niche or is just literally drafted by the incumbents to create a regulatory moat.
> We should also take into account that unregulated markets are hardly ever competitive.
There is no such thing as unregulated markets. Governments at a minimum enforce contracts and property rights, and then must do so in a way that doesn't enable market consolidation, e.g. by not enforcing contracts for the formation of a cartel or allowing one entity to buy all of the land in a city.
But regulations should be directed to pricing major externalities and promoting competition rather than trying to micromanage a society made rotten by other rules that make markets uncompetitive.
That is also what happened to the luddites. Adopt technology or the police will arrest you with loaded guns and you go to prison or get hanged. This part is left out to make the Luddites look foolish and technological progress the hero of the story.
> Adopt technology or the police will arrest you with loaded guns and you go to prison or get hanged
That really not true. Nobody forced them to adopt anything (in a literal way). It’s just that automated factories could produce more faster while paying their workers much less since they didn’t require skilled craftsmen.
Also artisans generally used a guild/cartel model which artificially constricted supply which inflated their incomes.
> out to make the Luddites look foolish and technological progress the hero of the story.
I thought it was pretty obvious to everyone that they were breaking machines because they eliminated demand for high skilled/high pay labour?
It is perfectly possible in a competitive market to have terrible work conditions. While the average conditions tend to improve over time, not all workers are in a good bargain position viz-a-viz employees. There are information assymetries, transaction costs for changing jobs, short-term biases, market failures and a lot of other issues in the real world.
This view also assumes that skills are perfectly replaceable, that there's no cost for requalifying for another profession, and that this is instantaneous or that people have some magical way to offset the opportunity costs of requalification while they train for another job.
The problem nowadays (and this is not exclusive to HN, although it is especially salient here) is that people like to fall between two ideological extremes: Either that the government is a inherently neutral and benign all powerful institution 100% of the time, or that free markets always exist, and are always pareto-efficient and that governments action is always some sort of rent-seeking parasite.
In the real world things are a lot more complicated. Not every thing can be solved with the heavy hand of government, neither the market itself is always able to reach the most humane solution. Politics is still needed, and we haven't reached the end of History.
> This view also assumes that skills are perfectly replaceable, that there's no cost for requalifying for another profession, and that this is instantaneous or that people have some magical way to offset the opportunity costs of requalification while they train for another job.
It does not assume any of these things. The cost of switching jobs is not required to be zero. What it does is provide a ceiling for what the existing employer can get away with.
They may be able to get away with paying you 5% below market or subjecting you to an inflexible schedule and it isn't worth changing jobs to one that doesn't do that, but if they try to make you use equipment that will kill you then you just walk right out the door.
Moreover, this is why a competitive market is important -- if you're qualified to be a steel worker but the steel industry is a monopoly, you can always learn to be an aircraft mechanic, but that takes time. Whereas if the steel industry has 10,000 companies in it, you go and work for one of the others using your existing skill set. Which reduces what employers can get away with.
> Then governments passed laws requiring it because politicians are adept at taking credit for good things that were about to happen regardless
With this attitude we’d still be driving with leaded gas, living in lead painting rooms with asbestos roofs and spraying ozone layer destroying aerosols amongst a bunch of other things.
The mechanism you described only really works with short term safety issues. If it takes years or decades for health problems to develop neither workers nor their employers tend to be particularly bothered about solving them.
> The mechanism you described only really works with short term safety issues.
The mechanism I described works for employment issues, because employees can choose not to take a job and more dangerous jobs carry a risk premium that both employers and employees have the incentive to reduce when reasonable safety measures are available.
With leaded gasoline and CFCs the victims have no option to refuse, and it's completely legitimate to prohibit harms and risks imposed on other people without their consent.
For some reason you’re making the assumption that most employees are as capable of estimating this premium as well as their employers and/or that it’s even possible to estimate this risk in advance?
If it's not possible to estimate the risk in advance then how is the legislature supposed to do it? If only the employers and not the employees know of the risk then who is going to advocate for a law? And in the latter case the employer would presumably have liability for knowingly exposing people to something harmful without informing them of the risk.
They were enforcing some laws and doing so selectively.
Striking workers were usually on the wrong side of the law though because they were using coercion and force to make every worker to participate in strikes (they could hardly work any other way without laws restricting “right to work”)
> they could hardly work any other way without laws restricting “right to work”
Well sure they could. The workers who agree with the strike go on strike and if that's enough of them to put pressure on the employers to meet their demands, their demands get met.
If it isn't, you've failed to convince your fellow workers that the light is worth the candle and if you don't want to work under the terms that they do, you can go work for someone else.
This is mainly a problem when there is no other someone else to work for, but now you're back to anti-trust rather than labor laws.
> that's enough of them to put pressure on the employers to meet their demands, their demands get met.
Or your employers can hire some thugs to disperse you and the other strikers. When you resist the governor will just use that as a justification to send in the national guard to “maintain law and order”. At least that’s how it often worked in the good old days..
> Well sure they could.
In an imaginary world maybe. In a society with no safety nets and and where any meaningful accumulation of savings is infeasible? Not so much.
> you can go work for someone else.
Under the same conditions. Labor has an inherently weaker bargaining position (due to certain pretty obvious factors) compared to business owners. Unless you have some external regulation or societal pressure and employers are behaving fully rationally (i.e. maximizing profits) that will always be the case for the majority of the workforce.
> Or your employers can hire some thugs to disperse you and the other strikers.
Now we're back to "everyone agrees that violence should be illegal."
> In a society with no safety nets and and where any meaningful accumulation of savings is infeasible? Not so much.
But then what difference does it make if you go on strike with 75% of the other workers or 100%? Either way the boss just waits two weeks until you all need to buy food.
Which still assumes that the employer is a monopoly. Otherwise you go on strike by taking some gig work in the meantime, which maybe sucks, maybe even sucks more than your current job, but it lets you make rent for as long as it takes for the employer to feel the need to meet your terms.
> Labor has an inherently weaker bargaining position (due to certain pretty obvious factors) compared to business owners. Unless you have some external regulation or societal pressure and employers are behaving fully rationally (i.e. maximizing profits) that will always be the case for the majority of the workforce.
There is no law requiring employers to pay anyone more than minimum wage and yet >98% of people make more than minimum wage. What explains this other than that employers have to compete with each other for labor?
Historically, it feels like laws compelling the government to act for the rights of workers has a mixed record.
There's a stronger record of laws preventing a government from acting against workers and ones permitting workers to take matters into their own hands.
> Thinking about the kind of life they had terrorizes me. I don't get how, for the longest time, people were fine with that.
A non-trivial number of these mine workers were arrested on trumped up charges like "vagrancy" for not having a job or "trespassing" for walking along a railroad. They would often be sold to companies as convict lease (cheap) labor. Essentially slave labor long after the Civil War since the 13th Amendment has the slavery loophole where it's allowed as long as you're convicted of a crime.
This disproportionately affected freed slaves in the South but was an issue for everyone everywhere since it introduced a profit motive to manufactured charges and inflated sentences. The extent that it predominantly affected Black folks and poor white folks had a lot to do with public sentiment not doing anything about it for a very long time.
To a not-small-enough extent, the same conditions exist today where labor can be coerced for little to no pay among the prison population, many of whom have been threatened with obscenely long sentences being shortened by accepting plea deals even when innocent or with extenuating circumstances. For-profit prisons often make the situation worse by further incentivizing incarceration on a larger scale.
> Makes you think about the sort of progress in worker protection that was made since then. But also this kind of story reveals how people are still ready to profiteer from such deadly practices, if given the opportunity.
It’s not just people “profiteering” though? The story mentions workers standing at Home Depot. These are ordinary homeowners hiring these shops to custom cut countertops for them. It’s not some mega-corp mass-manufacturing counter tops.
And now half the people who should be trying to put a stop to it are instead talking about how we need low skill, low education foreign workers that can easily be exploited to keep consumer prices low.
Oh yeah absolutely, but being a shareholder in there? I mean it's always easy to judge people whose context you don't know, but I think you can draw a line and this is past it
We can still draw those lines today, but mostly ignore them. Such as the nets around Foxconn factories, slave labor used to create chocolate, lithium mining, etc. Not nearly as dramatic as what those copper mine workers went through, but still quite bad.
People working in there weren't wearing any sort of hearing protection and became deaf within months. And after introducing pressured air driven equipment, they were all dying in a few years from silicosis. Until someone added water spraying to precipitate the dust into mud (wherein their issue became to fiddle caked in mud all day long in the dark, which I guess is an improvement over certain death). Which happened years later.
Thinking about the kind of life they had terrorizes me. I don't get how, for the longest time, people were fine with that. I mean no judgement on the workers, they probably didn't have a choice - but the people sending them in probably saw them as kettle.
Makes you think about the sort of progress in worker protection that was made since then. But also this kind of story reveals how people are still ready to profiteer from such deadly practices, if given the opportunity.
1: https://www.britanniaminemuseum.ca/