The gilded age was gilded only for a very few. And government was involved, indeed, the deck was stacked in favor of big business and against the little man. We had no worker safety laws, no child laborl laws, no decent housing laws, and as a result the workers were exploited, literally, to death. There was no unemployment insurance, no healtcare…you get the idea. Sure, some made fortunes then but it was generally on the backs of the others who were exploited. Food was often unsafe (ever read “The Jungle”), air and water were filthy. The reason we have the government restrictions we have now is because all these folks thought of was $$$. Since they were so short sighted and greedy, government steeped in to regulate certain areas. Now kids can’t be forced to work until a machine rips their arm off, for example. You can be forced to work with asbestos. We have housing standards and product safety standards. Had the businesses taken care of these things on their own, government would not have needed to respond. But they did not. That is why government has the role it does. I suggest you read a little more about the plight of the urban worker during the gilded age and try to imagine how you would have liked it.
I find your description of the living and working conditions during the industrial revolution fails to mention the quality of life prior to this period, or even immediately after the local authorities had implemented their safety regulations. Prior to the industrial revolution, many children had no choice but to engage in subsistence labor for their parents or as hired hands if they had no parents, and were frequently working long hours in squalid and unsafe conditions.
Even after the government stepped in, the changes that were called for, if and when they were implemented, did not genuinely improve working or living conditions simply because the technology of that era was simply unsafe. It is also well documented that most of these regulations were ignored or bribed away at the local level, much the same way that undocumented workers find employment today. What’s more, in many cases, the government regulations that regulated child employment actually increased the problems of poverty and other social ills. It either made those children dependant upon the state for their welfare, which usually meant orphanage, and placed additional financial burdens upon their already overburdened parents who were unable to support themselves or their children to begin with.
Rather than sing the praises of government intervention during the industrial revolution, the free market and the subsequent evolution of better technology and working practices are what actually solved the problem.
First, the fact is that the horrid living and working conditions of the industrial revolution were not unique in history to that era, but instead were the result of condensing the same conditions that had been considered acceptable throughout all of history into an extremely dense, urban environment. In this way, the industrial revolution actually revealed how bad things had really been all along for the workers, and in doing so created opportunities within the free market to improve productivity and business by correcting these errors. Previously, the results of squalid and unsafe conditions in less dense areas did not compel employers to find safer practices because the worker:employer ratios in rural environments did not justify the same kind of scrutiny as the industrial setting, where one employer would have several times the number of employees under them as a pre-industrial employer
Second, the progressive improvement of working and living conditions that have occurred since the dawn of the industrial age have very little to do with government regulation, as much as the bureaucrats would like to take credit. Instead, incremental improvements in technology and business savvy have gradually made it economically feasible and advantageous to engage in practices that increase worker safety and satisfaction. That is, when no alternative to an inherently unsafe factory machine were available, then the loss of skilled laborers due to death and injury, and the subsequent need to hire and retrain workers was regarded as an unavoidable cost of doing business. As technology improved, one of the improvements was that business owners were able to modify their tools to make them more safe, and thus more cost effective in the long term.
Using the same example, while modern employers are required to offer periodic breaks, they are not required to provide televisions in the break rooms. Yet, every minimum wage job I’ve ever had always had a TV in the break room- because every minimum wage employer that hired me understood that the TV meant their employees might come back from their break feeling like they’ve actually had a break, which meant they would be able to maintain a higher level of productivity. The government didn’t mandate TV’s in the break room-employers just did it because it was good for the employees, which they came to believe was good for business.
I have nothing to add but this is an excellent post.