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by dashundchen 3479 days ago
Just because injustices in he current system aren't as physically horrible as those in years past, does not mean we shouldn't look back for comparisons and solutions.

The power of labor in the United States has been continually eroded for the past several decades, for the unbounded gain of corporations and management. https://rewire.news/article/2016/03/11/anti-union-right-work...

The right to organize has been near lobbied out of existence in many states, and any new attempts are easily busted. At the same time, increased automation, ever narrowing specialization and oversupply of an educated workforce has given employers even more leverage over the labor.

1 comments

The OP was comparing working at google, one of the most sought-after jobs in the world, and which you can leave, to a coffin ship experience where the lice were so thick that you could simple scrape them off in bulk.

It's not just 'physically horrible'. How many people at google or microsoft have to sell their children to survive? The OP is just so patently ridiculous that the comment isn't even worth taking seriously - but unfortunately, there's Poe's Law...

I'm not comparing directly, but I want to put our "moral outrage" in perspective.

This was the 1700s. People were living on subsistence farming. If you weren't a landowner in England, you starved, and it wasn't like in 2016 where there's realistic talk of UBI based on automation, I mean it was like over a hundred years before Marx, and long before the industrial revolution.

And it's not like the "wealthy" were so terribly wealthy that they could just take "free" people to America.

And it's also not like the wealthy had nice 1890's first class ship rides.

The times were terrible, and the choices were terrible.