The Triangle Shirtwaist Company always kept its doors locked to ensure that the young immigrant women stayed stooped over their machines and didn’t steal anything. When a fire broke out just before the working day ended on Saturday, March 25, 1911, on the eighth floor of the New York City factory, the locks sealed the workers’ fate. The fire brigade’s ladders only reached the sixth storey, 30 feet short of the burning floors.
In just 30 minutes, 146 were killed, mostly women, mostly in their teens, and almost all Jewish or Italian immigrants. Witnesses first thought the owners were tossing their best fabric out the windows to save it, then realized workers were jumping, sometimes after sharing a kiss in an eerie precursor to the World Trade Center events of September, 11, 2001, only a mile and a half south. Incidentally, the fire was the worst workplace disaster in New York until 9/11. On the building’s east side were 40 bodies of those who jumped.
The company’s owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, had fled to the building’s roof when the fire began and survived. They were put on trial, but were acquitted when that the prosecution had failed to prove that the owners knew the exit doors were locked at the time in question. They had to compensate $75 per deceased victim, but the insurance company paid the owners about $400 per casualty. To this day, no one knows whether the fire was accidental or was started to claim this insurance money.
But the disaster was a watershed moment; it spurred a national crusade for workplace safety and unionization. From the unions’ perspective, the disaster could have been prevented if only the employers had given in to union demands the previous year during 20,000 strong citywide garment industry strike. Twice that number attended the memorial service for those who died, the unions insisted, because they could not unionize. Now the momentum was with them.
[Photo by Brown Brothers, Sterling, Pennsylvania.]
Incidents like these still happen in American factories. It’s just now they happen in foreign countries to foreign workers.
I hadn’t realized before that the Rasputina song My Little Shirtwaist Fire was about a real incident.