I read today that people were writing names in chalk on the street below 23-29 Washington Place in Manhattan, the names of women and girls who died 101 years ago today in the fire that launched a women's movement of empowerment and a labor movement toward the working conditions most of us here gladly still thank unions for. I wrote this post a year ago. But it's still important to remember this day. 101 years ago tonight they were lining up in rows burned and broken women for their families to identify ... did you also know about the fire in Newark? - Rosi
One hundred years ago - at 4:45p.m - the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire lit up. Within 30 minutes, there were dozens of bodies of women and girls dead on the pavement below and a horrible vision of death up on top of what was a modern American sweatshop. We remember these who died that day, and those that died before them in another sweatshop in Newark. The labor movement which followed their deaths is being undermined all over the country - in NJ, in WI, in Michigan, everywhere. Blue Jersey, we know which side we are on.
Do you know that a deadly factory fire presaged the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory? Exactly 4 months to the day before. On November 25th, 1910 at the corner of Orange & High Street (now Martin Luther King Blvd) a factory, the Wolf Muslin Undergarment Company, burst into flames, after gasoline was spilled in a lamp factory one floor below. The factory building had a mix of different industries, including an explosives company. Nineteen people lept to their deaths, some impaled on a spiky metal fence. At least six burned to death. The youngest worker was just 16. In a city-wide expression of grief, more than 100,000 people came to bear witness in the days after. New York City's fire chief warned that that kind of tragedy could happen in any of the sweatshops of Manhattan, unless something was done to improve the working conditions. And so, the memory of the Newark fire was fresh in workers' minds when 146 people, most immigrant women and girls, died at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
One hundred years ago, high up in a building a block from Washington Square Park, most of the girls and women were getting ready to leave for the day. It was 4:45pm, and they were working on a Saturday. Packing up their things, getting ready to walk down the long stairs. Fire broke out on the eighth floor, and the women rushed to get out. The fire escape twisted with their weight, and women in long dresses plunged to the street below as men rushing from the park held out their arms to try and catch them. On the ninth floor, the exit was locked. Fire ladders only went as high as the sixth floor. New York City police were weeping as women sailed to the pavement; many of them had beaten back some of those same women as they marched for better working conditions in the weeks before.
The Newark fire, below the fold ... |
| The earlier Newark fire was almost forgotten; we remember it only because a Star-Ledger reporter, Guy Sterling, researched it and retrieved it from history. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, bigger, worse, if such a thing is possible, we remember.
The spark of action and change after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was driven by progressives. From that, and from the lives of those lost women and girls we have reform of workplace heath and safety conditions, a drive to organize garment workers, and fire safety precautions. We have a labor movement - Look for the union label - that grew strong, built the middle class, made the American dream possible for millions, a labor movement now very much at risk.
All the progress of the last 100 years can be reversed in the face of union-busting governors with compliant state legislatures, even Democratic-controlled state legislatures. That is what is worth remembering. Collective bargaining is about workers having a measure of self-determination, because history teaches us what happens when they do not. We know which side we are on. |
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