We've been watching documentaries in the evenings at the Muskegon Critic household. The kids snuggle up on the couch with the wife, while I, being somewhat hyper-kinetic, prepare and can vegetables. As I type this I hear the ting and click of processed canning lids contract as they form a seal.
I'm usually on the floor slicing up green beans or tomatoes while the kids are wrapped in blankets leaning against their mama as the four of us watch some nature show, or some deep sea diving show, or some show about lost civilizations.
Tonight we watched a show about wild animals in China.
Last night we watched a documentary about a Lake Michigan train ferry that sank just to the North of Milwaukee in 1929. All hands were lost. It sank to the bottom of Lake Michigan with 52 souls. The SS Milwaukee.
The interesting and somewhat upsetting thing is why it sank...because it didn't have to sink. There are hundreds of ship wrecks lining the bottom of Lake Michigan. Sometimes there's simply nothing that can be done.
It wasn't the case with this ship, though. The SS Milwaukee had a fatal flaw in that it had no hatches between the main deck and the lower decks, though the ship inspection report said otherwise. As the ship took on water from the rough seas, it all flowed down to the lower parts of the ship uninhibited. And though the technology existed at the time, the railroad line that owned the ship, Grand Truck Railway, did not equip the ship with a means to communicate with land. They communicated their final information the old fashioned way....they wrote a final note about what had been happening to the ship while it was in distress, and basically stuffed it into a bottle and tossed it overboard.
I tend to see the story as a cautionary tale of corporate greed. A company that simply didn't equip its people with the tools or facilities to perform their jobs safely.
Stories like these tend to remind me that larger companies really, REALLY do not care if their workers live or die outside of how much it might costs them to compensate the families if they're forced to do it.
Stories like this remind me that the workplace improvements we've gained over the decades aren't something to be taken for granted, and that the continuation of that security is paper thin. My own great grandfather died from a factory injury and was tossed aside like a piece of meat with no family compensation, plunging his family into poverty for more than a generation.
That's one of the many reasons I find the hyper-conservative movement so worrying. They've all hopped on the bandwagon that romanticizes an industrialist era that was, in fact, horribly cruel to the actual workers. And while I like to think they're just being naive, the truth is probably more disturbing...that a large portion of the conservative leadership actually wants that kind of world again: where businesses can treat people like meat with impunity.