[roenxi]

> Such as the battle for minimum wage, the weekend, the 40 hour work week or the abolition of child labor?

https://www.bls.gov/IAG/TGS/iag70.htm tells me that the average hospitality worker is working 25 hours a week. Did we have another huge fight to bring the 40 hour work week down to 25 hours? I suspect not, or people would talk about that instead of the 40 hour week. That victory looks a bit hollow - much like any successes in pitching a minimum wage of low single digit dollars per hour which has been rubbed out by inflation.

Even the child labour one is interesting - children are unemployable regardless of the law, they don't have the skill, stamina or strength to participate meaningfully in a modern economy. It makes a difference, but this is a ban on something that doesn't make much economic sense to start with. This isn't a meaningful political question these days, the economy has no use for children. Child labour went the way of slavery - any society attempting to utilise it will get steamrollered by capitalists using productive techniques to do an order of magnitude better.

[vimacs2]

It certainly wasn't hollow when work weeks could go anywhere from 60 to 80 hours during the industrial revolution. The fact that the minimum wage has been rendered sub-optimal after several decades of inflation and a dramatically different economy from when it started isn't really a great argument against having a minimum wage. It is a great argument for updating it though.

Your point against child labor is however complete nonsense. The fact that most so called "modern economies" are propped up by overseas labor often performed by children in the developing world is not an unfortunate accident. It's the consequence of the obvious fact that there are many jobs where businesses will happily choose low cost and high volume of labor over individual "skill, stamina, or strength".

Meanwhile, the GOP in America are trying to overturn long standing child labor laws in an attempt to battle increasing demands for higher wages by service workers so don't try to sell me the idea that it was businesses that decided to end child labor instead of the reality that it was activists and strikers - often facing heavy violence from the state in response - that ended the practice.

I think if I even started to talk about the laughable notion that slavery ended because of (instead of being massively bolstered and spread by) capitalists, I would be here all day so I'll save that diatribe for another time.