Please don’t forget this!
Cari,
Welcome to the forum! Be sure to check out the newbie thread, filled with bunches of useful tips…
New member? READ THIS!
Walter “Advice to the Lovelorn” Block spoke a bit on this a while back.
The popular belief that government intervention improved working conditions is nonsense and contradicts basic supply and demand economics. Better conditions do not appear out of thin air because we declare them into existence. They are made possible because society becomes richer and is able to afford them. In the past conditions were crappy because society was poor. It was because free markets made us more productive that we could start improving conditions. That was when people started being unhappy with the old conditions. Before that, nobody protested them because they were considered normal. Capitalism didn’t create bad conditions, it turned them into a problem by improving conditions.
Capitalists compete for workers, thus workers receive higher compensation as society becomes more productive because higher productivity means labor becomes more scarce in terms of real wealth. As better working conditions become affordable, employers will provide them to compete for scarce labor. If it is cheaper to buy safety equipment than paying workers to work in an unsafe environment, employers will provide it. So better working conditions are nothing more than a result of raised productivity. Supply and demand causes wages and conditions to improve, not laws. This is so blatantly obvious that it’s odd that anyone ever thinks otherwise. Indeed, if working conditions were raised by laws, why would anyone ever provide better conditions than the legally mandated minimum?
Btw. in reality such laws were not intended to help workers, but to keep small companies, for whom it was more expensive to implement such requirements due to scale, from being able to compete with big companies. This had the intended effect of cartelizing the market in the hands of few big companies, which meant that they could pay workers less. Same as environmental regulation today.