Agnostic.com

6 5

[heyalma.com]

What exactly happened at the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Who were the victims? Why did 146 girls die? What did Elizabeth Warren base her speech in NYC the other night?

sassygirl3869 9 Sep 18
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

6 comments

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

2

In the mind of Trumpus Maximus these were the good old days, and they can't come back soon enough.
Our glorious capitalist system held out till The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and the The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 but eventually had to give in to the damn namby pamby socialist and stop killing their workers.

3

The exit escape doors were chained shut

4

Warren knows what is at stake right now in our Country. Those with all the money and all the power are calling all the shots, paying off our Congress critters to get what they want just like in 1911. They are enriching themselves while we struggle to get by on salaries that haven't gone up in 40 years for some people when you figure in inflation. Are we angry enough yet to raise some hell?

3

Thanks for the video.

5

On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 145 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable–most of the victims died as a result of neglected safety features and locked doors within the factory building. The tragedy brought widespread attention to the dangerous sweatshop conditions of factories, and led to the development of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of workers.

The Triangle factory, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, was located in the top three floors of the Asch Building, on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, in Manhattan. It was a true sweatshop, employing young immigrant women who worked in a cramped space at lines of sewing machines. Nearly all the workers were teenaged girls who did not speak English and worked 12 hours a day, every day. In 1911, there were four elevators with access to the factory floors, but only one was fully operational and the workers had to file down a long, narrow corridor in order to reach it. There were two stairways down to the street, but one was locked from the outside to prevent stealing and the other only opened inward. The fire escape was so narrow that it would have taken hours for all the workers to use it, even in the best of circumstances.

The danger of fire in factories like the Triangle Shirtwaist was well-known, but high levels of corruption in both the garment industry and city government generally ensured that no useful precautions were taken to prevent fires. Blanck and Harris already had a suspicious history of factory fires. The Triangle factory was twice scorched in 1902, while their Diamond Waist Company factory burned twice, in 1907 and in 1910. It seems that Blanck and Harris deliberately torched their workplaces before business hours in order to collect on the large fire-insurance policies they purchased, a not uncommon practice in the early 20th century. While this was not the cause of the 1911 fire, it contributed to the tragedy, as Blanck and Harris refused to install sprinkler systems and take other safety measures in case they needed to burn down their shops again.

Added to this delinquency were Blanck and Harris’ notorious anti-worker policies. Their employees were paid a mere $15 a week, despite working 12 hours a day, every day. When the International Ladies Garment Workers Union led a strike in 1909 demanding higher pay and shorter and more predictable hours, Blanck and Harris’ company was one of the few manufacturers who resisted, hiring police as thugs to imprison the striking women, and paying off politicians to look the other way.

On March 25, a Saturday afternoon, there were 600 workers at the factory when a fire began in a rag bin. The manager attempted to use the fire hose to extinguish it, but was unsuccessful, as the hose was rotted and its valve was rusted shut. As the fire grew, panic ensued. The young workers tried to exit the building by the elevator but it could hold only 12 people and the operator was able to make just four trips back and forth before it broke down amid the heat and flames. In a desperate attempt to escape the fire, the girls left behind waiting for the elevator plunged down the shaft to their deaths. The girls who fled via the stairwells also met awful demises–when they found a locked door at the bottom of the stairs, many were burned alive.

Those workers who were on floors above the fire, including the owners, escaped to the roof and then to adjoining buildings. As firefighters arrived, they witnessed a horrible scene. The girls who did not make it to the stairwells or the elevator were trapped by the fire inside the factory and began to jump from the windows to escape it. The bodies of the jumpers fell on the fire hoses, making it difficult to begin fighting the fire. Also, the firefighters ladders reached only seven floors high and the fire was on the eighth floor. In one case, a life net was unfurled to catch jumpers, but three girls jumped at the same time, ripping the net. The nets turned out to be mostly ineffectual.

Within 18 minutes, it was all over. Forty-nine workers had burned to death or been suffocated by smoke, 36 were dead in the elevator shaft and 58 died from jumping to the sidewalks. With two more dying later from their injuries, a total of 145 people were killed by the fire.

[history.com]

Thanks for the history Most of the women were Jewish young girls and Italian girls who did not speak English but Yiddish and Italian. There were about a dozen young boys.

@sassygirl3869 I remember learning about this in high school, you know, back when schools actually taught history....it made me so angry and sad because it seemed to me that women were not valued as much as men. Still seems that way 40 years later.

@sassygirl3869 And think about this -
Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 regulating the employment of those under 16 or 18 years of age, and the Supreme Court upheld the law.

4

At the time it was common to lock the doors to sweatshops to prevent the workers from taking a break. Having worked in cotton mills and sewing factories, I can tell you the air gets very full of tiny cloth/dye/thread particles, enough to give you a sore throat & runny nose, but also there can be spontaneous combustion (fire), just because the air is so saturated with agitated particles, or from a sparking machine, such as a burning sewing machine. The women (young women some immigrants) were locked in.
Some jumped to their deaths, others just burned, because they could not break open the locked doors. Led to changes in how workers were treated, somewhat.

Write Comment
You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:403934
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.