This is quite the paternalist view of working class people — is this not a concerted effort by working class professionals, asking for more? Considering the frequent remoteness of factory locations and the costs (monetary, social, etc) of moving elsewhere, striking for better conditions seems like a pretty educated decision, one which reflects an intimate understanding of the multiplicative effects of collective bargaining.

W/R/T the top-level comment: to frame coercive forces (isolation, geography, exploitation, and so on) as matters purely of individual choices speaks to a deep rejection of systems thinking that’s both

a. unproductive in a conversation about labor practices resulting from intricate and brutal edifices of human suffering, and

b. misses the point of collective action, which has over the course of multiple centuries chipped away at the brutality of said edifices, strike by strike.