The age-old strife between laborers and employers had been escalating for decades in the United States, but up to that point American law focused on protecting property rights and taxation, certainly not on the rights of working people. They were essentially an unprotected class. The Constitution had been written by men in a preindustrialized society where one in five people were enslaved and the majority of paid workers had been trained through an apprentice system that could be considered a form of indentured servitude. That’s why in early America, the concept of workers’ rights was unknown.
...more
