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Originally Posted by Undertoad
Mari I know this will sound like heresy but I am convinced the entire world was different in 1940s and 1950s and that applying modern concepts of safety and employment issues and such to the previous day is not really informative.
For starts the poverty rate was about 30-40% and the country was trying to quickly transition to an industrial economy where there would be far less scarcity.
The life expectancy was different. People died a lot. They smoked a lot -- because they died so much of other things that it wasn't obvious that cigarettes were bad for you.
It was a shock to me to take the Hoover dam tour and learn about the handful of guys who died building it. It wasn't that OSHA didn't exist. It was that it couldn't be done any other way at the time. Safety is a cost that we build into things routinely now, but we simply couldn't afford to do it at the time.
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In the '50's the poverty rate was around 16%:
http://www.census.gov/income/histpov/hstpov2.lst
I couldn't find statistics for the '40's doing my quick and dirty search techniques. I believe you are probably thinking about the depression era of the 30's, not the war years of the '40's or the post war boom in the US which started after WWII. I am talking about cancer related deaths from the '60's to present due to uranium exposure, not historical differences in longevity (which by the way haven't changed all that much - our current life expectancy is due mostly to changes in the infant mortality rate where children no longer die of epedemics caused by bacterial organisms).
My point is that there does need to be SOME government oversight of mega-business concerns. The little guy has his hands tied while the multi-national conglomerates do as they please.