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Ninety-six years have passed, and still the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire is vivid. It was the second deadliest workplace disaster in American history, exceeded only by the World Trade Center in 2001.
In the space of a half-hour, the Triangle fire took the lives of 146 workers, mainly Italian and Jewish immigrant women in their teens and early 20s. It changed the union movement and shocked the country. The story has been told in countless books, articles, plays, and photographs. On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the top floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in Greenwich Village. Fire fighters arrived at the scene, but their ladders weren’t tall enough to reach the upper floors of the 10-story building. Trapped inside because the owners had locked the fire escape exit doors—ostensibly to prevent workers from stealing—workers were burned alive or jumped to their deaths on the sidewalk. All that followed—the heaps of bodies on the sidewalk, the rows of coffins at the makeshift morgue, the manslaughter trial at which the factory owners were acquitted of all charges—marked a generation. In fact, dangerous sweatshops like Triangle where countless workers lost their health and lives were very common. But the Triangle fire was a great tipping point. The next day, 15,000 shirtwaist workers rose up, walked out, and demanded a 20 percent pay raise and a 52-hour week. The union movement, especially the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, was mobilized as never before. Several political leaders were radicalized. New York Gov. Al Smith appointed a Factory Investigating Commission, chaired by Robert Wagner, that led to important factory safety legislation and then a complete rewriting of New York’s labor laws. Wagner later went on to the U.S. Senate and became the author of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) that protected workers’ rights for two generations. A young social worker named Frances Perkins saw the fire and it changed her life. She went on to become U.S. secretary of labor in the 1930s, the first woman to hold a Cabinet position, and helped create the NLRA. And more than a half-century after Triangle, workers won the Occupational Safety and Health Act that gave them more protection on the job than ever. Yesterday, union activists along with political and community leaders gathered at Washington Place in Greenwich Village, the site of the fire, as they do once a year, to honor and remember the victims. And their memory is kept alive every day of the year by millions of workers who have won protections from toxic fumes, shoddy construction practices and dangerous assembly lines, and who still struggle for all the protections they need and deserve—all too often, the same kinds of protections that our martyrs were denied 96 years ago. |
