Some modern jobs.
On the other end of the spectrum you have Amazon drivers pissing in bottles--something that a steel mill laborer would never have had to do.
Are you really suggesting that laboring at a steel mill decades ago was a more comfortable job than being an Amazon worker? That's incredibly out of touch.
Even modern steel mills, with all of our technology and safety regulations, are difficult jobs. That's why they pay more than being an Amazon warehouse employees or drivers.
Older steel mill jobs were absolutely hellish. The struggles at modern Amazon jobs have been greatly exaggerated or cherry-picked in the news. There's no comparison between the two.
Fortunately the work of drivers driving big lorries is more tightly regulated with the worker's wellbeing also taken into consideration so that there's a fixed time interval per day you are allowed to drive, after which you have to literally stop at the first parking spot at the side of the road, no matter what the boss screams in your phone from half-way across the continent.
Are they not required to comply with driving time trackers?
From https://ec.europa.eu/transport/modes/road/social_provisions/...:
"Daily driving period shall not exceed 9 hours, with an exemption of twice a week when it can be extended to 10 hours."
Unfortunately not for the smaller vans. In your link they mention:
> road haulage and passenger transport vehicles,
which "road haulage" I'm pretty sure means the regular big lorries we all think about. But when driving a Mercedes Sprinter [1] the same rules don't apply. You can actually drive that Sprinter with a regular driver's license, while for a regular lorry you need to take additional exams so that you can get into the "you can drive a lorry/big truck" category.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/20...
But a lot of door-to-door delivery these days uses "independent contractors" who use their personal vehicles and fuel, and get paid e.g. £120 for 180 deliveries.
Nobody's enforcing digital tacho cards for people's personal vehicles.
However, working in a modern steel mill is a far cry from that. Even back in the 1970s (which is several decades ago please note), "Get the book" (operating manual which specified procedures, training, safety equipment, how many men were required, etc.) was a standard retort when managers ordered you to do something dumb. And the union protected you when you told the manager to go pound sand because it was outside the manual.
Amazon warehouse workers are schlepping around heavy stuff--just like many old school manufacturing jobs. And get crushed, injured, etc. just like many old school manufacturing jobs. However, they have zero protection and not much training and no backup to tell managers to get stuffed.
Now, would I trade a programming job for a steel mill one? Absolutely not. Would I trade an Amazon warehouse job for a steel mill one? That's not as clear to me.
You spelled "half a century" wrong (:
This might be true but the comparison is profoundly misleading.
We should instead contrast the improvement in quality of working life with the improvement of other jobs and society in general.
Humanity (and US especially) has amassed an incredible amount of wealth, knowledge and technology in the last decades.
Switching from employment to "gigs" is as huge step backward and the quality of life is dropping for many people.
It's sometimes a bit too easy to look at the past through sepia-colored lenses, and assume that the present must be worse. As an antidote to that tendency, it's worth reading this description of the actual reality of working in one of Andrew Carnegie's steel mills at the turn of the 20th century:
> Indeed, flames, noise, and danger ruled the Carnegie mills. "Protective gear" consisted only of two layers of wool long-johns; horrible injuries were common. Wives and children came to dread the sound of factory whistles that meant an accident had occurred.
> "They wipe a man out here every little while," a worker said in 1893. "Sometimes a chain breaks, and a ladle tips over, and the iron explodes.... Sometimes the slag falls on the workmen.... Of course, if everything is working all smooth and a man watches out, why, all right! But you take it after they've been on duty twelve hours without sleep, and running like hell, everybody tired and loggy, and it's a different story."
(Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carnegi...)
I've worked blue collar jobs and I've worked white collar jobs, and I'd take Bezos over Carnegie any day. And the very fact that sounds like such faint praise highlights how far we've come.
Also, aside from risk in objective terms, which was surely a consequence of technology and level of material wealth available to some degree -- how seriously did the society and culture generally take the issue?
Even since 1985, the rate of both workplace injuries [1] and fatalities [2] have fallen significantly. (the fatality graph doesn't go all the way back to 1985, but if you look at the source data they cite, the trend continues)
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/surveillance/images/laborfo...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/surveillance/images/laborfo...
The real issue isn't whether people have to pee in a bottle sometimes--it's the nature of the business--but how prevalent it is. That is, do the drivers on routes with available facilities have the time to make use of them? But that's a far more nuanced question that doesn't make for good sound bites.
Anecdotally, at the very start of the pandemic I had read a similar complaint from someone whose relative worked in delivery - with offices (and retail) on the lockdown there were fewer potential pit stops along the route.