One Southerner says the Confederacy was a ‘con-job’ on white people — and its legacy still is today
(A really interesting read)
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/one-southerner-says-the-confederacy-was-a-con-job-on-white-people-and-its-legacy-still-is-today/
>snip<
Q: Joshua Holland: You say the Confederacy was a con job on whites then and now. Didn’t white Southerners profit immensely from slavery prior to the Civil War?
A: Frank Hyman: Yeah, but most of the profit then, as now, went to the one-percenters – people at the top of the pile. About a third of Southern families did own slaves, so it was pretty widespread, but there were plenty of families that might own one or two enslaved Africans. They weren’t wealthy. The bulk of all slaves were owned by the top 5 percent or 10 percent of Southern families.
A small number of people in the South profited immensely. In my research I found that most of the one-percenters in the US were Southerners, not Northern industrialists. The Southern states were wealthier than any nation in Europe except for England, because there was so much money to be made growing cash-crops if you weren’t actually paying people to help you harvest them.
Q: But there was a middle class. In addition to those smaller landholders, there must have been other people who sold wagon wheels or imported fancy goods from Europe or whatever.
A: Right, but for the bulk of the population – what we would call the working-class today — slavery wasn’t at all financially beneficial. One-third of the population were African-Americans being paid nothing for their work, and that drove down wages. And not just in agriculture. Slavery drove down wages in the skilled crafts because a quarter of all enslaved people were trained to be carpenters and cobblers and masons and wheelwrights and shipwrights – and everything else you could imagine. The slave-owners thought, ‘gosh, why should I pay this white guy a professional wage when I can just train some of my slaves to do the work?’
So most white folks in the South were economic losers because of slavery, but many of them bought into the institution for what they saw as its social value. They might have a crummy deal in life, but somebody else had it even worse than they did. That was a big selling point in a lot of the literature from that period, many of which were owned by slaveholders. Pamphlets, newspapers, novels and magazines conveyed the message that you might have it rough as a poor white person, but you were still better off than black people.
= new reply since forum marked as read
My grandfather and his brothers each had farms. One survives - a portion of it - as a strawberry picking monstrosity. That's it. 
The following is a short list of positive and negative laws passed that affect the United States worker. Of course, one could make a study of the following information, also using Wikipedia as a guideline is advisable, whereas, using Wikipedia as a final source is not.
Fair Labor Standards Act
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (abbreviated as FLSA; also referred to as the Wages and Hours Bill) is a federal statute of the United States. The FLSA introduced the forty-hour work week, established a national minimum wage, guaranteed "time-and-a-half" for overtime in certain jobs, and prohibited most employment of minors in "oppressive child labor", a term that is defined in the statute. It applies to employees engaged in interstate commerce or employed by an enterprise engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce, unless the employer can claim an exemption from coverage.
The FLSA was originally drafted in 1932 by Senator Hugo Black, who was later appointed to the Supreme Court in 1937. However, Black's proposal to require employers to adopt a thirty-hour workweek met stiff resistance. In 1938 a revised version of Black's proposal was passed that adopted an eight-hour day and a forty-hour workweek and allowed workers to earn wage for an extra four hours of overtime as well. According to the act, workers must be paid minimum wage and overtime pay must be one-and-a-half times regular pay. Children under eighteen cannot do certain dangerous jobs, and children under the age of sixteen cannot work during school hours. The FLSA affected 700,000 workers, and President Franklin Roosevelt called it the most important piece of New Deal legislation since the Social Security Act of 1935.
link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act#Further_reading
Labor Management Relations Act of 1947
The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 29 U.S.C. § 401-531 better known as the Taft–Hartley Act, (80 H.R. 3020, Pub.L. 80–101, 61 Stat. 136, enacted June 23, 1947) is a United States federal law that restricts the activities and power of labor unions. The act, still effective, was sponsored by Senator Robert A. Taft and Representative Fred A. Hartley, Jr., and became law by overcoming U.S. President Harry S. Truman's veto on June 23, 1947; labor leaders called it the "slave-labor bill" while President Truman argued that it was a "dangerous intrusion on free speech", and that it would "conflict with important principles of our democratic society". Nevertheless, Truman would subsequently use it twelve times during his presidency. The Taft–Hartley Act amended the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA; informally the Wagner Act), which Congress passed in 1935. The principal author of the Taft–Hartley Act was J. Mack Swigert of the Cincinnati law firm Taft, Stettinius & Hollister.
link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Management_Relations_Act_of_1947
Right-to-work law
A "right-to-work" law is a statute in the United States that prohibits union security agreements, or agreements between labor unions and employers, that govern the extent to which an established union can require employees' membership, payment of union dues, or fees as a condition of employment, either before or after hiring. Right-to-work laws do not aim to provide general guarantee of employment to people seeking work, but rather are a government regulation of the contractual agreements between employers and labor unions that prevents them from excluding non-union workers, or requiring employees to pay a fee to unions that have negotiated the labor contract all the employees work under.
Right-to-work provisions (either by law or by constitutional provision) exist in 25 U.S. states, mostly in the southern and western United States, but also including the midwestern states of Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Business interests represented by the Chamber of Commerce have lobbied extensively to pass right-to-work legislation. Such laws are allowed under the 1947 federal Taft–Hartley Act. A further distinction is often made within the law between those persons employed by state and municipal governments and those employed by the private sector with states that are otherwise union shop (i.e., pay union dues or lose the job) having right to work laws in effect for government employees.
link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
The United States is at a cross-roads today on the view of labor. The real truth is wages grew from the 1930's to the 1970's. From the 1970's to the present, wages have remained relatively flat...
