Politics & Power Quote by William Greider

The number lands like a blunt instrument: 49 years. Greider isn’t offering nostalgia for a tougher, “simpler” America; he’s puncturing the national bedtime story that hardship was character-building and the market naturally delivered progress. By anchoring his point in a stark average, he forces the reader to confront what “work” meant before modern labor protections and public health: not just long hours, but a life structurally engineered to be shorter.

The phrase “most working people died still on the job” is doing more than painting a grim tableau. It reframes mortality as an economic outcome, not a private tragedy. Dying at work isn’t only about accidents; it’s about bodies spent early by industrial conditions, inadequate medicine, poverty diets, and the absence of a safety net. Greider’s subtext is accusatory: if you miss the scale of early death, you’ll misunderstand why unions, regulations, sanitation systems, and Social Security weren’t paternalistic luxuries but survival technologies.

Context matters. In 1900, infectious disease, child mortality, and workplace danger dragged life expectancy down, and “retirement” barely existed for the laboring majority. Greider, a chronicler of American political economy, is also taking aim at contemporary arguments that romanticize deregulation or treat social programs as soft decadence. The intent is to collapse the distance between then and now: today’s longer lives are not proof of moral improvement or market benevolence, but of collective decisions that redistributed risk away from individual workers. The line is a warning disguised as a statistic: roll back the scaffolding, and the old bargain returns.