Hundreds of workers died drilling a tunnel through a West Virginia mountain in the early 1930s, most from breathing toxic silica dust. The company buried the workers, then told inquiring families that the laborers had moved.

Through the 20th century, we've come a long way in protecting workers' lives and dignity from workplace tragedies like the infamous Hawk's Nest tunnel project.

Today, most workers can't be forced to toil night and day; their bodies are shielded from spills and burns; they're compensated for injuries.

In the early 1900s, workers had virtually no rights.

They feverishly turned out a Model T "tin lizzie" a minute for Henry Ford, or sewed from dawn past dusk in an unheated, locked sweatshop. Orphans called "dogs" worked in glass factories, where they were scarred by burns and sickened by the heat.

Progressive reformers publicized these brutalities.

Reforms followed: an embryonic workers' compensation law in 1908, child labor laws in 1916. Although toothless and partial, they led to stronger federal laws protecting workers in the 1930s, says historian Alan Dawley.

Through the booming 1950s, deaths and injuries kept dropping.

Yet most employers and workers didn't worry about the less obvious environmental hazards, such as asbestos and benzene and noise.

Federal intervention, beginning with the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, has helped, but also has been criticized as focusing on trivialities and creating red tape.

Sweatshops still persist. And while work-related deaths have plunged 75 percent since 1912 even as the workforce tripled, nearly 5,000 workers still die each year, including 250 from overexposure to the same thing that killed those West Virginia tunnel drillers, silica dust.

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