Yes, hungry girls will work unsafe, degrading jobs because need trumps everything else. What point are you trying to make? That we should return to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory days? Sweatshops? Child labor?
Or are you asking for greater regulation of farm equipment safety?
Yes, factory girls work in less than ideal environments because like all of us, they take what they feel is the best of their available options. You seem to think that taking options away from people helps them. That doesn't make sense. That's what government regulation does: takes options away from people.
So you try to argue that employers are forced to make workers slave away in death-trap work places because they have to compete with other employers who do the same and if only Mommy Government could disrupt the Nash equilibrium, then everyone would be better off. You are not making the right comparisons. Governments do not give people better options. A growing economy that gives workers more choices for employment gives people better options. Sustainably growing economies are the result of capital formation (savings), innovation and risk-taking on the part of entrepreneurs. Were State-owned factories is the Soviet union models for efficiency and safety? To ask is to answer.
I tried appealing to your conscience--my mistake, you're smarter than those lily-livered liberals. Let me be more honest and direct:
"Mommy governments" are not run by the poor. Not by bleeding hearts trying to give stuff away to the great unwashed. They're run by sane, pragmatic middle and upper class, who know that unless the poor are given a basic minimum wage and humane working conditions, said poor tend to get not just unpleasant to look at, but desperate.
Desperate enough to do the rich serious harm.
The poor, though weaker and generally dumber than the rich, are much more numerous, and have become progressively more so due to basic free market tenets such as "money flows into smarter hands" and, yes, shameless breeding.
Shit was brewing around the world. Worker unrest. Revolts--Communist, National Socialist. All predictably capitalizing on collapsing economies and crashing stock markets.
Laissez-faire had to adapt or die.
TL;DR: A few minor concessions were made and ...Here we are
