Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Friday, March 25 marks the 100 year anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, New York’s landmark industrial disaster that killed 146 of the factory's 500 employees, most of them young immigrant women and girls of Italian and European Jewish descent. The tragedy sparked a nationwide debate about workers rights, representation and safety. Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 100 Years Later – WNYC:

When the factory was open, it was a crowded space where workers churned out hundreds of shirtwaists, which were fashionable dresses of the time that featured an upper portion styled like a man's shirt, with buttons and a turnover collar. In the early 1900s, many considered the Triangle Shirtwaist Company one of the more modern New York workplaces, despite being overcrowded and lacking an evacuation plan in the event of a fire.

As the factory's tailors and seamstresses prepared to leave for the day on March 25, 1911, they suddenly found the building had caught fire. The women were trapped in the burning sweatshop and many died trying to force locked doors open. Others threw themselves from the windows.

As the factory burned, firefighters and onlookers alike were astonished to find the hoses could only reach as high as the sixth floor. Efforts to fashion impromptu rescue strategies, including human chains for the workers to climb and nets to catch those who began jumping, were largely unsuccessful.

After the incident, factory owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were indicted for manslaughter. But the pair was acquitted after less than two hours of deliberation.

Outraged by the verdict, union organizers from groups such as the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (I.L.G.W.U.), which represented female garment workers nationally, rallied for change. They demanded that better workplace safety laws be required.

Three months after the fire, Governor John A. Dix signed a law creating the Factory Investigating Commission. Following the findings of the commission, the New York State Legislature enacted 36 statutes to regulate workplace fire safety and ventilation, and to set minimum standards for working women and children.

The public fury over the fire and its scores of female victims proved a particularly strong rallying point for women's rights advocates. The garment workers' union and the Womens' Trade Union League both seized the moment to organize garment workers and push for collective bargaining rights.

On Friday, March 25, church and firehouse bells across the city will ring at 4:45 P.M.—the time the first fire alarm sounded 100 years ago. It's one of many memorials, events and exhibits held across New York this month that commemorate the centennial of the fire.

This article contains a complete listing of all the local New York City events memorializing the 100th anniversary of this tragic event. Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 100 Years Later – WNYC. H/t photos New Deal Network Photo Gallery.

Laura Clawson at Daily Kos had this post on Sunday. Triangle: Remembering the Fire:

This is the week of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle fire, and tomorrow (Monday) night at 9:00, HBO is airing a new documentary. Triangle: Remembering the Fire is relatively brief, but it adds a great deal to the sketch, on several levels.

The documentary first places the Triangle fire in context: Less than two years earlier, garment workers had gone on strike in the Uprising of 20,000, making outrageous demands like a 52-hour work week and overtime pay.

Meanwhile, the fiercely anti-union owners of the Triangle factory met with owners of the 20 largest factories to form a manufacturing association. Many of the strike leaders worked there, and the Triangle owners wanted to make sure other factory owners were committed to doing whatever it took—from using physical force (by hiring thugs to beat up strikers) to political pressure (which got the police on their side)—to not back down.

Soon after, police officers began arresting strikers, and judges fined them and sentenced some to labor camps. One judge, while sentencing a picketer for “incitement,” explained, “You are striking against God and Nature, whose law is that man shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. You are on strike against God!”

The Triangle company held out, the workers went back, and the safety concerns they raised went unaddressed. That New York's garment workers had been fighting for better treatment, and that many of the fire's deaths might have been prevented had they succeeded, is a central part of the context Triangle: Remembering the Fire provides.

That context of struggle is crucial to understanding the fire's aftermath, in which New York instituted a range of workplace protections. Frances Perkins would later famously call March 25, 1911 "the day the New Deal began."

We don't, in other words, have fire alarms and sprinklers and adequate exits and other workplace protections because big employers want us to have them. We don't have them solely because of tragedy. We have them because workers have joined together and fought for them. In 1911, workers' struggle was the context that made the Triangle fire something other than a meaningless accident, that showed a way to prevent similar tragedies.

Triangle: Remembering the Fire does something else as well. It vividly, forcefully puts the humanity of the Triangle workers in front of us. Much of it is told by descendants of the fire's victims and survivors, and augmented by photos of the victims. It takes hold of you, all their beautiful serious faces—teenagers working 60 or 70 hour weeks, recent immigrants struggling to get ahead. And after the fire, their families were left struggling to identify them from the smallest remnants, seemingly inconsequential possessions that survived.

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Triangle: Remembering the Fire is an indispensable memorial to the 146 working men and women who died horrible deaths on March 25, 1911, doing justice to both the story of lives lost and families grieving and to the story of struggle for workers' rights and the importance of government regulations.

When you take for granted safety regulations like fire escapes and lighted exit signs and emergency fire hoses, or workplace regulations that ended child labor and sweatshops and limited hours and overtime, I hope you will take a moment to remember these young women who tragically lost their lives in order to make the things that you take for granted possible. And remember that what you take for granted can just as easily be taken away by those who would like to return to a time when there was no "guvmint regulations" to protect you.