On This Day in History: March 25
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
“tHe fReE mArKeT wiLL rEgULaTe iTseLf!” – some libertarian douche. Yeah, that self-regulation sure worked out great for the 146 garment workers who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire because the asshole company locked all the exits to prevent people from taking breaks from working their asses off for a pittance.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: March 25, 1911--
Advancements in society are made because people are pissed, and they’re willing to reveal just how pissed they are about not being treated with a modicum of decency. Rights come from fighting for them, not asking nicely. Those with power will ignore anyone petitioning for change that doesn’t serve the interests of the powerful. They must be forced to change so that ignoring demands becomes more costly than acceding to them. Across areas and eras, it has repeatedly been shown that this is how the world works.
On March 25, 1911, a terrible fire broke out in the Asch Building in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. The factory manufactured women’s blouses called “shirtwaists,” but in making such shirts many lives were wasted.
It was mostly immigrant women who worked in the factory, many as young as 14. They worked nine hours a day Monday to Friday, and an additional seven hours on Saturday. For their 52-hour workweek of hard, hot labor, they were paid between $7 and $12 a week. In current value, that translates to about $200 to $350 a week.
The fire began in a bin filled with scrap cloth on the eighth floor, possibly due to someone carelessly tossing a cigarette butt into it because they couldn’t go outside for a smoke break because the fucking owners locked the fucking doors. Flames raced up the building; the workers were trapped by the locked doors. The asshole foreman who held the key had fucked off via one of the few open exits to save his own worthless ass and took the goddamn keys with him. Like, I just want to pause for a moment to say fuck that guy with a cactus.
Anyway, 123 women and 23 men, most of them very young, lost their lives that day. Some jumped to their deaths. In one tragic scene, a man and a woman were seen to kiss each other before they leaped to their doom. Fucking hell.
The owners were put on trial for manslaughter and acquitted. A civil trial followed, and they had to pay $75 per life lost, but the insurance payout on the fire worked out to $400 per victim. Again: Fucking hell. In the aftermath, legislation for worker safety was improved, and the power of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union saw it become one of the largest and most powerful labor unions in America.
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And then the factories took their manufacturing practices overseas to countries like Bangladesh, where rules, laws and regulations didn't matter, and they became incredibly wealthy and contributed to the slow destruction of humanity and the planet.....
Keep on doing what you're doing, James.