Someone who relates to employers as though they were benevolent would be incorrect in the case against unions though? Unions have shown to be nearly universally beneficial to the workers that participate in them. That is not my opinion. That is verifiable fact.
If a company was strictly benevolent as you’ve claimed then why contest the union? Why negotiate terms at all? Just hear what the employees en mass want and sign your name on the dotted line. The fact that this does not happen, and we constantly see company’s hire law firms to bust the unions or otherwise drag their feet to apply changes to company structure upon reaching a compromise is objectively evidence that the company is not benevolent.
If unions didn’t work then there would not be unions.
I mean yeah but the point is that technological advancement was still a common occurance. Like, yeah a sensationalized article about self driving cars would blow some minds but to most i think it wouldn’t really make any bigger waves then basic cars already were at the time. How can they be blown away by the concept of self driving when the vehicle itself is so new and interesting you know? AI is so abstract that even today most people don’t understand it, 100 years ago it’d just be “another new thing” just like it is today… We are actually less accustomed to ground shaking new inventions so I’d argue that 100 years ago a lot of our modern tech would be less exciting given the regularity in which things were changing then.
Social upheaval however is ALWAYS a huge deal, especially for the time. Bear in mind that Progressivism is a fairly new ideology in the States. For literally hundreds of years social change came at a snails pace and took serious, concerted effort. Nowadays we are on average much more open to change and accepting of diversity in all it’s forms, but there’s a reason everyone remembers the name Martin Luther King Jr., versus… Ruth Bader Ginsburg I guess?