The Bangladesh Tragedy: Triangle Shirt Waist Fire Redux

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirt Waist Company.  Occupying the top three floors of the supposedly fireproof Asch Building in lower Manhattan, Triangle Shirt Waist was a sweatshop owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris.  The workforce was composed almost entirely of young immigrant women, mostly Jews who had little education, spoke little English, and made little money.

It was late on a Saturday afternoon when the fire was first noticed.  The workers  had been winding down their standard six-day workweek, collecting their meager pay, and opening their purses and bags for mandatory inspection by the male managers.

When the fire broke out on the 8th floor, efforts to douse it failed; pails of water were no match and the emergency fire hose was broken.  The fire spread quickly as 180 panic-stricken workers looked for an exit.  A manager phoned the 10th floor, which housed salespeople and executives, including owners Blanck and Harris.  All but one of the people on the top floor were able to escape to the roof and the safety of an adjoining building.  But they did not warn the 250 workers on the 9th floor; all phone calls had to go through the switchboard on the 10th floor, which was now vacated.  Workers on the 9th remained unaware of the situation until the conflagration rose to meet them.

The hundreds of firefighters and police who arrived on the scene were impotent to rescue them.  Ladders only reached the 6th floor.  Hoses could effectively spray to only the 7th.  As women fled to the fire escape, it collapsed under their weight.  Some of them began to jump, but the nets designed to catch them ripped from the force of their plunging bodies.  Yet women kept jumping to their deaths as the flames crept closer, some of them leaping arm-in-arm, bound together in friendship during their final, terrifying moments.  One firefighter later said: “They pattered on the pavement just like that, just like rain, and we couldn’t see them so often as hear the thuds.”

Back inside the building, corpses stacked up by the exits, unable to escape because, like many sweatshop owners, Blanck and Harris routinely locked their workers inside the factory during the workday.

When the final tally came in, 146 people had died, 123 of them women.  The youngest victim was fourteen year old Sarah Maltese, who perished along with her sister and mother.

A temporary public morgue was setup at the pier on 26th street, and all but seven of the bodies were identified.  On April 5, 350,000 people stood in the bone-chilling rain at a funeral procession organized by the International Ladies Garment Worker’s Union for the unidentified seven.

The tragedy of the Triangle Waist Company fire was hardly an isolated incident.  American workers were killed and injured on the job in droves during the industrial revolution.  The figures are staggering.

Every year from 1880-1900, on average 35,000 American workers died and another 536,000 were seriously injured as a result of workplace accidents.  Heavy industry claimed the lives of steel workers, coal miners, railroad workers and the like.  But even textile workers were best by the dangers of large machinery, factory air thick with particulate matter, and firetrap workplaces.  In some years of the 19th century, the industry’s epicenter in Lowell, MA boasted the highest death rate in the nation.  And labor gains were slow in coming.   Indeed, garment workers in New York City had been on strike only a year before the Triangle fire.  But gains were modest as New York City police officers had been used as strikebreakers.

But if the Triangle fire wasn’t an aberration, in some ways it was a turning point.  Blanck and Harris faced a manslaughter trial, though they were acquitted.  One juror later explained that he believed the women had flown into a panic because garment workers were inherently stupider than other people.

The two owners would later settle civil suits brought by survivors, paying $75 to each victim’s family.  Meanwhile, they had over insured their business for fire damage, and profited from the tragedy to the tune of $65,000, or about $1.5 million in today’s money.

The city, and to a lesser extent the nation was outraged.  New York Governor John Dix established the Factory Investigative Committee, which went on to collect over 3,500 pages of testimony about the deplorable industrial working conditions.  New York quickly passed comprehensive labor reform that became a model for many other states.  In addition to concerns about fire, the new codes set standards for ventilation, lighting, sanitation, worker safety, and included some of the nation’s first child labor laws.

Not all the changes in workplace protection were immediate or even effective.  For example, when Blanck was caught locking workers into his factory again just two years later, he was fined all of $20.  And sadly, American workshops are not completely a thing of the past, even to this day.  Though far fewer in number, they do persisting in an underground economy.  But a sea change had come.  Overt standards for workplace safety were being developed and taken seriously, and the culture of work in the United States was changing.

One-hundred-and-two years after Triangle Shirt Waist factory fire tore through the Asch Building, that horrible event is brought to mind by the recent tragedy in Bangladesh.  After a building housing a garment factory collapsed, more than 1,100 people died in what is now being recognized as the worst workplace disaster in the history of the textile industry.

Once again, it is not an isolated incident.  Indeed, 112 Bangladeshi garment workers had died in another workplace disaster just a few months before.  And once again, public outrage is growing, this time on an international scale.  The corporations that exploit foreign textile workers, much like the robber barons who exploited garment workers a century ago, are coming under increasing pressure to change the way they do business.

Meanwhile, here in America, there is talk of a growing fair trade movement for clothing similar to the one of growing popularity for coffee and chocolate.

Only time will tell if international garment workers can achieve the same protections that American garment workers began earning a hundred years ago.  Even if, it was too long in coming back then, and it is too long in coming now.

How many more must die?

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For information on the Triangle Shirt Waist tragedy, see: Jo Ann E. Argersinger, The Triangle Fire (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009).