Last month, we released a booklet on fire safety in the workplace to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. You can read more and download the booklet, “Fighting Factor Fires: 100 Years After the Triangle Fire” here. This booklet is based on content from our book-in-development, A Workers’ Guide to Health and Safety. If you are interesting in learning more about this and other material from the book, how to get involved (by becoming a partner or donor), or would like to share with us your feedback, please contact Miriam at workersbook@hesperian.org.
We weren’t the only ones commemorating this important anniversary – dozens of media outlets used the opportunity to talk about the fire, as well as the development of labor struggles and the fight for safe working conditions in the United States. Many of these commentators discussed the current attempts to repeal worker’s collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin and around the Midwest, as well as the lack of new safety standards after recent large-scale industrial accidents such as the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Massey Energy Upper Big Branch Mine disaster. Those two workplace accidents in 2010 killed 11 and 29 workers respectively.
Steve Frasier, writing for CNN, spoke of the fire’s legacy: “One reason the Triangle fire has lodged so deeply in the public memory is that it marked a watershed in the nation's public life. … Those 146 men and women died in part because they had been denied a voice in determining the basic conditions of their working lives. Their deaths were redeemed by an aroused citizenry that had come to realize that such a right was a matter of life and death and of human dignity.”
On Huffington Post, Marcus Baram and Andrea Stone’s discussed the current attacks to workplace regulations, “The GOP's budget proposal includes slashing $99 million from the Occupational and Safety Health Administration, a 40 percent reduction in the budget of the federal agency most responsible for making sure the nation's workplaces are safe -- Democrats claim that translates into 8,000 fewer workplace hazard inspections and 740 fewer whistleblower discrimination probes.” Their lengthy piece goes on to detail not only gaps in current regulations and in funding, but a lack of enforcement of existing laws. The piece also includes several photos from the original Triangle Fire.
Writing for Salon, Joan Walsh reminds us that the post-fire boom in pro-labor legislation didn’t happen in a vacuum:
Clearly, the Triangle fire tragedy is seizing attention because it's a vivid, heartbreaking example of what happens when you have unbridled capitalism, no unions and a state dedicated to protecting the prerogatives of business owners, not the larger society. It's also getting attention because, in the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's heroic labor secretary Frances Perkins, the day of the awful fire was "the day the New Deal began." New Deal architects and New York powerhouses Al Smith and Robert Wagner led the remarkable four-year investigation into the fire, which resulted in an astonishing barrage of pro-labor legislation, creating new health and safety codes as well as restricting child labor and shortening the work week for women (to 54 hours).
But it must also be remembered that a lot of organizing and protest led to that post-Triangle labor agenda. In 1909, 20,000 garment workers, most of them women, engaged in a massive four-month strike, after Triangle workers voted to unionize -- and were promptly fired. Women who joined the "Uprising of the 20,000" regularly went to jail -- over 700 were arrested -- and in the end, the strike won public support and resulted in the unionization of several garment companies. But not Triangle. The awful tragedy just a year later proved the need for unions, and for state worker protection; without the union ferment and the four-month strike, New York politicians might not have paid the kind of attention to the Triangle tragedy that led to [Al] Smith and [Robert] Wagner's legislative agenda and gave the rest of us the New Deal.
To learn more about the Triangle Fire, visit the Cornell University Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives online archive materials.
Download our booklet, “Fighting Factor Fires: 100 Years After the Triangle Fire” here.
Comments