It sounds to me like you're conflating the difficulty of the work (coal mining is hard, dangerous work) with the way people treat each other at work (like the shitty bosses in the article).
When I read books about other times and places, my main impression is that the work may have been harder, but that the people were much kinder to one another.
Given that I've worked at some places that were horrible and some that were very kind, I'd say that the dangers of the work are often temporarily necessary for economic reasons [1], but the way we treat each other is something purely chosen. Not always chosen explicitly, but a natural consequence of other choices we make in setting up the systems in which we work.
It used to be fairly common for a boss to physically beat the people that worked for them. If anything a modern 'high stress' jobs are a cakewalk compared to what people used to deal with.
Sure, but most people didn't have jobs until recently. A lot of human history is subsistence agriculture in small villages. And a lot of human prehistory is various sorts of nomadic life. The boss-as-tyrant model is only possible when somebody makes their living by controlling others, which only works in times of substantial free resource scarcity and low opportunity.
A good point in general, though I'd add that, 1) slavery has been around for a long time and in many cultures family members are/were treated as property, especially women and children; and 2) for much of history[1] power, including ownership of land, has been concentrated in few hands, who often were not very kind to their subordinates.
I wonder what the historical distribution of self-employed (including subsistance farming) vs employed by others.
[1] Of course it depends how far back we go in history. Until 10,000 years ago we all were hunter gatherers.
When I read books about other times and places, my main impression is that the work may have been harder, but that the people were much kinder to one another.
Given that I've worked at some places that were horrible and some that were very kind, I'd say that the dangers of the work are often temporarily necessary for economic reasons [1], but the way we treat each other is something purely chosen. Not always chosen explicitly, but a natural consequence of other choices we make in setting up the systems in which we work.
[1] E.g., coal mine deaths have fallen off pretty sharply as we have gotten more wealthy and more technologically advanced: http://www.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/coalstats.asp