Political Quotes

“When unions sprang up to defend the rights of workers, they were treated as illegal conspiracies, ruthlessly smashed by companies that either used violence or called on the police or military to defend their interests. The unions rarely made more than temporary gains. When America began to industrialize in the 1800s, the relationship between workers and their bosses changed dramatically. Craft work by skilled employees was replaced by mass production with hundreds or even thousands of people working for a single, impersonal corporation. Giant powerful entities generally treated their workers like faceless, expendable commodities--inputs into the production process, whose costs had to be kept low in order to maximize profits in the incomes of robber barons. That was certainly true in my home State of Pennsylvania. The corporations amassed enormous wealth, but the employees were mostly left behind, with lives of misery and hardship. In Pittsburgh, for example, the western corner of our State, a remarkable in-depth sociological study by the Russell Sage Foundation of the lives of working families in the early 1900s found widespread grinding poverty and child labor, poor health and education, and astonishing levels of work-related injury and illness. In Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, with a million residents, more than 500 workers died in industrial accidents in a single year, most of them in the steel mills. The same was true in the coal mines.…”