6 ms·

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

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. 1: https://www.britanniaminemuseum.ca/ https://www.britanniaminemuseum.ca/

ttfkam 3y ago
> 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.
jerzmacow 3y ago
"it is what it is" plus having a hungry family to feed?
- charles_f 3y ago
  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
  - city41 3y ago
    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.
    - Robotbeat 3y ago
      We mine vastly more copper, coal, etc than lithium.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
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.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  > 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.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > 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.
    - 3y ago
rayiner 3y ago
> 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.

ttfkam 3y ago

> 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.

jerzmacow 3y ago

"it is what it is" plus having a hungry family to feed?

charles_f 3y ago
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
- city41 3y ago
  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.
  - Robotbeat 3y ago
    We mine vastly more copper, coal, etc than lithium.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

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.

ffgjgf1 3y ago
> 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.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > 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.
  - 3y ago

rayiner 3y ago

> 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.