By Doug Draper
It was a tragedy that did not happen in this region, but it is one that led to better rules for protecting the rights and safety of all workers across the United States and Canada to this day.
The women are placed in coffins near the place they plunged to their deaths in one of North America's worst workplace disasters.
One hundred years ago this March 25, at 4:45 p.m. on a Saturday in the Washington Place/Greenwich Village area of New York City, a fire broke out on the lower flower of a building where, on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors, hundreds of young women, most Italian and Jewish Immigrants, were working in sweatshop conditions for an outfit called the Triangle Shirtwaist Company.
These were women, many of then in their teens and 20s, who toiled more than 12 hours per day for peanut wages and even had the doors to the floors they worked on locked on them so they couldn’t go to the washroom while foremen hovered over them like masters with whips on a 19th century cotton plantation somewhere way down in the deep south. Two years earlier, some of these same young women joined a strike for union rights, but that was crushed.
Now the flames of the fire were closing in on them and there were few ways of getting out. For many, the only choices left were incineration or leaping out the windows to certain death.
More than 140 young ladies died in that dreadful fire, making it the worst building disaster in New York City history until the twin towers of the World Trade Centre went down on September 9 in 2001. The tragedy led to hearings in New York State and regulations for protecting the safety and rights of workers that became a template for labour laws across the continent.
Sadly, 146 young lives had to be lost in a horrific way before greed gave way to a little bit of relief for working people.
One hundred years later, on this March 25 in New York City, memorial services and other events are being held to remember the young women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Indeed, all of us who care a little about decent working conditions for people should take a moment to remember these poor young ladies.
If you want to know more about this event in history, go on Google or whatever search engine you use and click in the words Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. When I did that earlier this week, I was struck by a few lines by a Yiddish poet, Morris Rosenfeld, that he wrote shortly after the fire – “Damned be the rich! Damned be the system! Damned be the world!”
A little bit too damning perhaps, but what do you think?
(Share your comments below on this subject and visit Niagara At Large at http://www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to residents in our greater Niagara region and beyond.)
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I think this is a World-class article, that’s what i think. Way to raise the bar in media by not insulting our intelligence.
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I am a former union organizer, graduate of Cornell University’s Labor Studies Program and to all union activists, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was one of the most important events in the fight for union rights and for women’s rights. Thank you for drawing attention to it. It seems to take a tragedy to make the wheels of legislation move faster. In my studies, I was appalled at the instances of child labor, unsafe working conditions and human rights violations that were rampant in the U.S. and elsewhere during that period in our history. There was even a movie about it called “The Inheritance” produced by the Garment Workers Union. Saw it many times. It should be shown to remind people of man’s inhumanity to man – in the name of greed. It is also a reflection of what is going on in the U.S. right now as certain state governors are working to strip away collective bargaining rights so hard fought for in the aftermath of tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
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It is too bad that disasters that shaped our world such as the Triangle Factory fire are often forgotten enabling the wealthy to continue running rampant over the rights of the poor “peasants”. Probably very few people have even heard of it. The same is true of such gross miscarriages of justice as the Emmitt Till case and its influence on the cause of civil rights. How many people have ever heard of him?
It seems the Dickensian conditions of those days are returning thanks to the continuing greed of the capitalist fat cats aided by the governments that are bought and in their pockets. Conditions in many industries in those times were so toxic and dangerous that the life expectancy of the workers, including children, was measured in a couple of years. They were poor, unimportant and expendable. Unbridled capitalism will always lead to such horrific conditions unless the public is vigilant. The victims are always nameless and unimportant.
The Gilded Age certainly did not mean a thing to the average labourer, only to the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Astors and the like. A good analogy would be the Titanic. Lock the gates to steerage so the wealthy can be saved and let the men, women and children below decks fend for themselves.
A lot of people are currently dumping on unions (with the encouragement of propaganda from the wealthy eg exporting of jobs to 3rd world countries in spite of the fact that a few benefits to the workers would only diminish their profits by a ridiculously tiny percentage) but few care to know enough history or are old enough to realize what conditions would exist without them.
Greed is a primary motivating factor for humans and there will always be such tragedies. They will cause a stir at the time and then, sadly, be largely forgotten.
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Pingback: Remembering A Tragedy – One Hundred Years Later – That Set The Tone For Better Labour Rules For Working People Across This Continent
Many of these corporations farm their work out to developing world countries (i.e Bangladesh) where the workers work in the same conditions as those described above, with meager wages as above, but they’ll work 7 long days a week instead of 6.
And we want to give them more tax breaks??
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This whole tragedy was recently on Buffalo public television and they showed the faces of these workers most, recent immigrants, and the beauty of these poor women was astounding some as young as 14 years old some sisters, they were trapped, as their cruel bosses padlocked the workers inside ,many jumped out of the windows, a lot like the Twin Towers 9/11, just horrifying to see. to get any action people have to die, even to get a red light installed, what a cold blooded people the human race can be. people are just data.
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