Industry defenders blamed miners’ poverty on the workers’ own lifestyle choices

Evidence

Just attributed the cause of workers’ health problems to poor living conditions rather than to unhealthy working conditions. Many of the miners lived in shabby shacks amid piles of dust. Just criticized them for making bad lifestyle choices: “[T]he wages paid in our industry are certainly adequate to support decent living. That many people who can afford better homes, prefer to live in small, unpainted two or three room shacks and spend their surplus funds on automobiles and radios cannot be charged against the mining industry” (Just, 1940). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1794

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• DEEPTHINKING: Blame displacement transferring cause from the industry’s own toxic workplace to the victim’s consumption habits is a strikingly pure instance of moral disengagement’s victim-blaming mechanism - worth sitting with how quickly economic culpability gets redirected onto personal lifestyle.
• ADDENDUM: This victim-blaming dynamic parallels the moral panic framing in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ - both show authorities redirecting structural harm onto individual conduct.

Related

• Corporate spokesmen blamed workers’ own lifestyle choices for occupational disease (similarity 0.90)