YOUR TIME MACHINE TO THE PAST!

Contact Us: Swapsale@aol.com

TRENDS

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire

MARCH 25, 1911

100TH ANNIVERSARY

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York and resulted in the fourth highest loss of life from an industrial accident in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent immigrant Jewish and Italian women aged sixteen to twenty-three.^[1][2][3] Many of the workers could not escape the burning building because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits. People jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers.

The factory was located in the Asch Building, at 29 Washington Place, now known as the Brown Building, which has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark.^[4]

The Triangle Waist Company^[5] factory occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building on the northwest corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, just to the east of Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. Under the ownership of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory produced women's blouses, known as "shirtwaists." The factory normally employed about 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women, who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays.^[6]

Bodies of the victims being placed in coffins on the sidewalk.

As the workday was ending on the afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire flared up at approximately 4:45 PM^[7] in a scrap bin under one of the cutter's tables at the northeast corner of the eighth floor.^[8] Both owners of the factory were in attendance and had invited their children to the factory on that afternoon.^[9] The Fire Marshal concluded that the likely cause of the fire was the disposal of an unextinguished match or cigarette butt in the scrap bin, which held two months' worth of accumulated cuttings by the time of the fire.^[10] Although smoking was banned in the factory, cutters were known to sneak cigarettes, exhaling the smoke through their lapels to avoid detection.^[11] A New York Times article suggested that the fire may have been started by the engines running the sewing machines, while The Insurance Monitor, a leading industry journal, suggested that the epidemic of fires among shirtwaist manufacturers was "fairly saturated with moral hazard."^[9] No one suggested arson.

^{MORE:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire}

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Trial
by Doug Linder (2002)

Just then somebody on the eighth floor shouted, "Fire!"  Flames leapt from discarded rags between the first and second rows of cutting tables in the hundred- foot-by-hundred-foot floor. Triangle employee William Bernstein grabbed pails of water and vainly attempted to put the fire out.  As a line of hanging patterns began to burn, cries of "fire" erupted from all over the floor.  In the thickening smoke, as several men continued to fling water at the flames, the fire spread everywhere--to the tables, the wooden floor trim, the partitions, the ceiling. [CONT.]

MORE: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/triangle/trianglefire.html

MORE:  http://infusion.allconet.org/virtual/TriangleShirtwaistFireNetscape.html

CONSEQUENCES

Rose Schneiderman, a prominent socialist and union activist, gave a speech at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911, to an audience largely made up of the members of the Women's Trade Union League. She used the fire as an argument for factory workers to organize and not rely on the "good people of the public....We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us....I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement."^[36]

Others in the community, and in particular in the ILGWU,^[37] drew a different lesson from events. The New York State Legislature created its New York State Factory Investigating Committee to "investigate factory conditions in this and other cities and to report remedial measures of legislation to prevent hazard or loss of life among employees through fire, unsanitary conditions, and occupational diseases."^[38] New York City's Fire Chief John Kenlon told the investigators that his department had identified more than 200 factories where conditions made a fire like that at the Triangle Factory possible.^[39] The State Committee's 1915 report helped modernize the state's labor laws. It made New York State "one of the most progressive states in terms of labor reform."^[40] As a result of the fire, the American Society of Safety Engineers was founded in New York City on October 14, 1911.^[41]

MORE:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire

Outsourcing Tragedy: On the 100th Anniversary of Triangle Shirtwaist, Workers Are Still Dying in Garment Factory Fires

One hundred years ago today, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in lower Manhattan. After locked doors made flight impossible, many workers leapt to their deaths to escape the flames. One hundred and forty-six people died, in a tragedy that helped catalyze a national movement for workplace reform.

Unfortunately, we do not need to look back a hundred years to contemplate the horror of garment workers falling from the high floors of a burning factory. The last such nightmare befell workers barely 100 days ago, on December 14, when thirty workers were killed and more than a hundred injured at a factory producing for Kohl's, JC Penney, Target, Wrangler, Phillips-Van Heusen, Oshkosh, Gap and others.

The sad irony on this centennial of the Triangle tragedy is that the abusive conditions, poverty wages and shoddy garment industry safety practices that unions and social reformers decried in 1911 have not been eliminated. They have been outsourced.

Faced with rising wages, strong unions and enforceable safety regulations in the United States, clothing brands and retailers have moved virtually all of their production overseas. Today, America's dresses, jeans and t-shirts are produced in the contract factories of the developing world, where lax regulation, microscopic wages, and the near total absence of unions and collective bargaining ensure the cheap and flexible production the industry craves.

MORE:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-nova/outsourcing-tragedy-on-th_b_840558.html