It kind of did. Nobody wants to stop a factory line to hose a worker out of it and workers that are scared of getting maimed or killed are less productive. Workplace safety is a win-win in most cases.

We didn't get government mandated workplace safety until it was basically the norm and people convinced the government to crack down on the places it wasn't the norm.

Many, dare I say most, societal changes follow this "the change mostly happens then the government forces the stragglers to get on board" manner. You simply don't have strong legislation in democracies until after the public opinion has already shifted (see same sex marriage for another example).

True enough. Child labor laws came about after child labor became unproductive - you can see this in that there exemptions in the law where it was still productive, such as agricultural work.

Kids make for lousy workers. For example, for the sake of this discussion put aside your moral feelings, and think about kids in your workplace. That's right, there's little useful they could do, and you'd have to dedicate adults to trying to get them to do something useful. Think of what schoolteachers go through trying to get work out of kids. Think of what parents go through trying to get their kids to clean their rooms.

One would expect child labor shops to not have the same moral reservations that parents and teachers have.

Abusing people doesn't result in very effective workers. It's another reason why free markets outproduce coercive economic systems.

This is an incredible argument. Abuse and coercion (and poor working conditions in general, and long working hours, lack of holidays and sick leave and all the other things that progressive politics and labour unions have given us) are extremely common part of the workplace outside of western society - say in clothing sweatshops, on deep sea fishing ships, or many other places. This will possibly get better if and when the workers in these places get better opportunities for bargaining, but of course there will be push-back from the factory-owning classes.

Similarly, child labour is still very common and as far as I'm told in some places even on the rise, so there must be more to the story of its disappearance from the west than "children make bad workers".

You’ll notice that those abusive places outside the "western society" seldom have functioning free markets.

That is what made those societies successful anyway: freedom which brought innovation which brought prosperity. Not the fact that they were "western".

But this isn't proof at all that economic freedom is what leads to improved conditions for workers. It's hardly the Chinese government that's forcing the hand of the poor sweatshop owners, just like it wasn't Queen Victoria who made 19th century steel mills what they were. It was factors like the labour movement and progressive governments that gradually forced capitalism to temper itself and allow the working classes to live better lives, and there is absolutely nothing to suggest that this will not have to replay itself outside of the west.

No. What improves the lives of employees is competition between employers for said employees. For that you need enough employers and thus - startups. Which require economic freedom.

Are you seriously saying that the advancement in worker's conditions in the late 19th and throughout the 20th century were due only to employers being in competition with one another, and not due to legislative demands and union pressure? That the difference between conditions in, say, France and America are because French employers are just nicer people or have faced stiffer competition?

I've been both employer and employee. When employees don't like their job, they quit and move on.

If that wasn't true, every employee would be at minimum wage, and Google wouldn't offer free lunches.

I'm not really talking about 20-something software developers in Silicon Valley. There are things that keep people in jobs they don't like.

The lives of ordinary people in the US increased dramatically before unions came along.

The evidence that free markets lift people up is enormous.

The average life span of the working Englishman decreased significantly during industrialization, and I am sure the same was the case across the pond. It took the better part of a century to clean things up, and I find it quite astounding that you suggest that this would have happened without unions. People died to get their bosses to start treating them like human beings. Especially in America, where the government did not shy away from shooting its own citizens when they went on strike. Do you honestly think that that is just some appendix on history which could be removed, and the free market itself would have guided us away from the dickensian Hell it set up?

Today we have a large group of mistreated sweatshop labourers that produce clothes and gadgets for the industrialized world under conditions that would never be accepted in America, much less Europe. Are those conditions not a result of free markets? Companies who were free to move their production to places that were not encumbered with things like safety laws and minimum wages? And what in the world makes you think that those conditions will become universally a thing of the past without intervention?

No law in Cambodia forces seamstresses to work 16 hour days, no law is forcing the sweatshop owners to demand this of them, everyone involved is in principle free, indeed they are probably freer than I am in my country. That is why the works takes places there and not here.

The labour there creates billions of euros of surplus value that end up as profits for the multinational companies that employ them (directly or indirectly). There is enough money made in the clothing industry to pay decent wages to these people, just like there is enough money in many of the companies in Europe and America that employ the "working poor" to pay people what they need, but it is not done, because by and large companies pay people as little as they can get away with.

This is a problem that can only be solved empowering workers to make demands of their employers. Some workers are rare enough that they have this power by default - I know this, I am one of them, for now. But for the rest, the best way to empower workers is to allow them to band together, either directly in unions, or indirectly via progressive governments making sure that the legislative frameworks that companies operate under result in a decent quality of life, even for those in unskilled jobs.

That's because abuse and coercion leads to workers pushing back. So what are labor unions, then, but a natural by-product of a free market capitalist system?

There is nothing anti free market about unions.