I’m 27 years old and live in the upper Midwest.
Was able to chat with a group of gentlemen who were all in their 80s.
They were talking about working in construction in the 1950s. And laughed about how OSHA would have a heart attack if they knew what happened back then.
It seemed like a modern day Wild West.
I asked what changed, and they all said the 1970s happened, and that’s when the government started cracking down on everything.
So what changed?
Laws, by nature, tend to accumulate. Very few laws are actively targeted for repealing.
A new law is created when a critical mass of people become aware of something or are impacted by something.
Environmental regulations took off in the 1980s and 1990s. Prior to that, the word “pollution” wasn’t really in our lexicon. People didn’t know that spraying rando oil all around town could be make that town unlivable. They couldn’t even imagine such a thing. But when shit happens, people learn. And that learning eventually manifests as a law.
Laws help learned people sleep better at night.
I think it balances out. We have many fewer laws defining who can sit at lunch counters or preventing them from getting birth control than we had in the past
Government exists to protect the weak from the strong. Prior to the seventies, corporations were much freer to endanger the public and their employees. Product liability, worker safety and environmental protection became more important that profits alone.
There is a movement to make America great again, I hear.
People realised the could make workplaces safer through laws.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4822a1.htm
Because there are so many more lawyers now than in the past?
OSHA was established in 1971 precisely because people DID know about what happened back then.
Complete with masses of unnecessary deaths.
It wasn’t? The Clean Air Act was passed in 1963, and the EPA was created in 1970. :rolleyes:
There’s certainly more people and more literacy now than in the past. People are more likely now to not only know they have a right but feel strongly enough about it to fight to keep it.
I’m 67, so I lived through this. In the late '60s and early '70s there started to be organized resistance to the industrial lobbyists who opposed any regulations, and the harm things caused began to be covered in the news. It took until 1970 to ban cigarette ads on TV. Back in the good old days each Labor Day and Memorial Day would inspire stories about how many people would die on the roads. Mad Magazine even did a parody of the Jerry Lewis Telethon, this one encouraging people to go out there and die in an accident so that we could make our numbers.
Seat belts and air bags and safer cars all helped.
When I was a kid there were no seat belts. Luckily my parents didn’t run into anything or get hit with me in the car - so I never got thrown out into the road to crack my head and die.
What happened in 1970 (and later?) We came to our senses.
A while back, I saw a TV show about the construction of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis which said, in so many words, that there’s no way it could have been constructed nowadays, with modern safety regulations.
What a coincidence – the construction of the Gateway Arch is the first thing that came to mind for me as well.
The Gateway Arch was constructed from 1963 to 1965. In 2017, my family and I took a trip to St. Louis to see the eclipse. During that trip, we toured the Gateway Arch, and there was a more-or-less contemporary film in their education center that detailed how the arch was built. As an engineer and construction manager, I was struck by the apparent complete lack of modern safety practices. There were men (and they were all men), working at the top with no safety vests (or shirts, for that matter), no safety harnesses, no fall protection, no hard hats, etc. Men were leaning against the structure at the top where one slip or trip would mean their death from a fall. The kicker was the narrator commenting that they had expected there to be a dozen or so deaths in a project of this magnitude, and they were pleased to announce that nobody died during construction! My reaction to this was, “OK, but not for lack of trying.” :rolleyes: IMHO, they were very lucky that nobody died.
With that said, the construction of the Gateway Arch today with modern safety regulations is certainly possible. Builders construct projects at similar heights all the time today. They certainly couldn’t build it today in the exact same manner that they built it 55+ years ago, it would almost certainly take longer, and it would certainly cost more (even correcting for inflation). But you would also be required to do everything possible under modern OSHA rules to keep the workers safe, and you wouldn’t be depending on pure luck that nobody gets injured or killed.
I remember reading/hearing something a while back that made some sense to me. It attributed some amount of the increase in specific laws to a change in societal attitude. Please forgive me - I’m sure I’ll butcher it. But perhaps not so much such that the germ of the idea will remain hidden.
Previously, there were some shared attitudes that allowed legislation to be drafted using more general terms to protect concepts such as “fairness.” And courts were considered competent to apply such more general laws/concepts to specific situations.
More recently, the trend has been to say, if it isn’t SPECIFICALLY precluded, it is allowed. Individuals and organizations profit from operating in the gaps. You know the attitude. Someone does something that everyone KNOWs is shitty behavior, but they defend their action simply because it is not specifically prohibited. So greater detail is needed to specify every instance of inappropriate behavior (and to carve out areas others want protected.) Rather than a set of general guidelines, modern law is viewed as a specific rulebook.
Doesn’t explain ALL of it, but I think it has SOME merit.
It’s because organizations, especially government, cannot accept the fact that, occasionally, “Shit happens.” They feel that they have to “fix” anything that goes wrong, no matter how infrequent the mishap. The only way to do that, they believe, is with rules/laws.
There can be an intersection that has been problem free for years. One day, somebody changing a radio station enters the intersection and T-bones another car. Voila, there is a traffic light in that intersection within a week.
Even sports has gotten into the act. The Super Bowl has been very well officiated overall for half a century. One blown pass interference call later, and we have yet another major rules change in the NFL.
Fact: You can never and will never legislate away human error. It is, in fact, part of the pageantry of the human experience. As many games have been lost by mistakes as have been won by great plays. Many a key battle in war has been lost by mistakes rather than won by brilliant tactics. It has always been thus, and thus it will always be.
We’re legislating ourselves to death in virtually every facet of life.
It’s fun for cynics to claim this, but it’s not true, at least not the final phrase. In the US (and I would imagine in other developed countries as well), government agencies do weigh the costs involved when trying to decide whether a new regulation is justified. To do this, they assign a monetary value to a human life, typically several million dollars. If a proposed new environmental/occupational/aviation/traffic regulation consumes a lot of resources (time, material, money, etc.) but an analysis shows that it won’t save many lives, then it’s not worth it and won’t be put on the books.
Quite the opposite. Laws save lives more often than cost them.
I’m not sure that’s a good example. We have more laws against making laws/rules/policies defining who can sit at lunch counters.