True, but some bad laws were repealed in the process.
And for whatever reason, an incidence of overregulation comes to mind. As part of either the railroad regulations which broke up the transportation monopolies or as part of labor legislation, a law was passed which required that railroad porters be paid for every hundred miles.
At the time this was passed, the average speed of rail travel, counting stoppage time and all, was about ten miles per hour. (Go a few miles, stop half an hour, etc.) Within only a few years, technology changes plus new business models turned this well-intentioned attempt to bring an eight-hour day into railroad life into a major expense well beyond what was originally intended. If memory serves, the law wasn't repealed until Taft-Hartley in the late 1940s, by which time rail travel was already on a steep decline.
Apropos of nothing to this conversation, of course.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-07-04 10:30 pm (UTC)And for whatever reason, an incidence of overregulation comes to mind. As part of either the railroad regulations which broke up the transportation monopolies or as part of labor legislation, a law was passed which required that railroad porters be paid for every hundred miles.
At the time this was passed, the average speed of rail travel, counting stoppage time and all, was about ten miles per hour. (Go a few miles, stop half an hour, etc.) Within only a few years, technology changes plus new business models turned this well-intentioned attempt to bring an eight-hour day into railroad life into a major expense well beyond what was originally intended. If memory serves, the law wasn't repealed until Taft-Hartley in the late 1940s, by which time rail travel was already on a steep decline.
Apropos of nothing to this conversation, of course.