Your Mom’s A Blog

At this point some might ask “why then is America so wealthy and successful (not as much now as in the past)?”  Surely the free market must work on some level.  The market does work, “on some level.”  The real problem is that people forget that the government has stepped in a number of times to make sure that things continue to be fair.  I know some of my Republican/Libertarian friends don’t like that I’m saying this, but I haven’t seen any good evidence to the contrary.  I will elaborate.

At the end of the Civil War the United States began to rebuild and expand.  The Industrial Revolution had begun so fewer and fewer people were needed to produce the food required to feed the nation.  As a result, more and more people became industrial laborers (previously the majority of the population was involved in food production.)  The lower classes made up the majority of the population, with a growing middle class found in towns and cities and a small upper class.  Conditions in most industries were appalling.  Women could be paid less than men, so factories preferred women.  As a result men took a cut in pay meaning two incomes from a man and woman were less than they might otherwise have been.  Children could be paid less than women, so factories began to prefer children.  As a result men and women took a pay cut, meaning three or more incomes from a man, woman and child were much less than they would have been.

A factory would spring up, they would build a city around it or one would begin to grow there.  The owners would start a store where people would have to buy the things they needed to live and work in the factory.  The owners would also prevent other stores from coming into the area, often through strong-arm techniques.  Cars weren’t available, even if they had been the factories paid people just enough to survive, so purchasing a car would have been out of the question.  Some industries were nightmarish.  Some men in the steel industry would work 12 hour days.  This made the shift break up easy for the owners, there were two a day.  Some owners would have workers change the shift they worked every month.  This meant that once a month half the workers got a whole day off while half worked the ‘long’ shift (in this case a 24 hour shift.)  The people who had it good were those who only had 10 hour work days and worked only 6 days a week.  (Fortunately as a nation of mostly Christians many industrialists were wary about making people work on Sunday.)  There was no such thing as overtime, vacation or health benefits.

Aside from the bad hours, the work was dangerous.  Industrial accidents were common and fairly disastrous for the individuals involved.  As previously mentioned, a person injured after working in cramped dark dirty conditions for 16 hours for barely enough wage to survive, was usually fired.  There was no health insurance, no law protecting worker health and safety.  If you needed your hand to do work and that hand was crushed in a machine, you were simply out of luck.  In 1911, 146 garment workers were burned, died of smoke inhalation, fell or were crushed to death when the Triangle Shirtwaist factory caught fire.  Managers had locked the doors from the outside because it was payday and they didn’t want the workers leaving early.  It is not certain what caused the fire, though a factory full of grease for machines, open flame gas lighting, stacks of cloth and no fire suppression system might burst into flames simply from karma.

Everything that contributed to these deaths was done in the interest of cutting overhead.  Doors locked to get the most work from the workers, cheap open gas lighting and potentially faulty wiring, no fire suppression system, a fire escape not big enough or strong enough to allow people to flee the building, etc., etc.  And this was not the first time people had died in industrial accidents or the last.  These were not new problems in the history of industrialization; the companies know about them, had the capital to fix them and simply chose not to because they considered it a waste of money.  It was the government which eventually began legislating that the work place should be as safe as possible, that the work week should be 40 hours, that children under a certain age shouldn’t work in factories, that workers should be fairly compensated.

This was the work of the “incompetent” government “meddling” in the affairs of business and the free market.  And, no surprise here, they called it socialism back then as well.  And what happened when companies started to compensate their workers fairly?  The lower class started becoming the middle class, so that today the largest class of people, in the United States, is the middle class.  As it turns out, the middle class spend more money than the lower classes do, buy more products and services, thereby helping companies and the wealthy.  But left to their devices, the wealthy couldn’t figure that out.  They took the short term gain at what was considered an unacceptable human cost only to make less money than they might otherwise have made.  So it would seem that the free market also encourages a short sited and somewhat myopic view of capital and gain.