Today in Labor History March 30, 1930: Three thousand workers, mostly African-American, began construction on the Hawks Nest Tunnel in West Virginia. The employer cut costs by failing to provide safety equipment. Additionally, bosses forced the men to work 10-15-hour days, often at gunpoint, without breaks and without masks to protect themselves from the silicon dust. Consequently, hundreds of workers died of silicosis. Possibly over 1,000 people, one-third of the entire workforce, died from silicosis, in one of America’s worst cases of mass workplace mortality.
Today in Labor History February 24, 1919: U.S. Congress passed a new Child Labor law. However, in 1924, the courts declared it unconstitutional. A similar law passed in 1917. The Supreme Court ruled that one unconstitutional, too. It wasn’t until the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that modern child labor laws were enforced in the U.S. However, the law never banned child labor in agriculture. Consequently, 500,000 children pick roughly 25% of all the food harvested in the U.S. They often still work 10 or more hours a day. They are exposed to dangerous pesticides and die at a rate five times higher than kids in other industries. Barely half the kids working in agriculture ever finish high school.