The fire that engulfed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City on March 25, 1911, took only half an hour to do its damage, killing 146 garment workers. The tragedy’s impact on worker safety and health in America has lasted a lot longer.
“Policies that were enacted because of that fire permeate American workplaces now,” Kirstin Downey, author of a biography of legendary workers’ rights advocate Frances Perkins, told the Associated Press.
One hundred years later, as the tragedy is being commemorated from coast to coast, the legacy is reflected in, among other things, fire safety requirements now taken for granted. That includes automatic sprinkler systems, mandatory fire drills and accessible, clearly posted fire exits.
Robert Solomon of the National Fire Protection Association, an industry group that writes fire-safety codes, says the tragedy inspired a change in fire-safety philosophy, from preserving buildings to saving the people inside them. “The Triangle Shirtwaist fire was kind of that watershed moment when everybody said, ‘Enough,’” he told American Public Media’s “Marketplace” radio program. “When you look at the building regulations at that time, many of them were really directed at preserving the building itself, the structure and the contents, but the people — kind of not given a very high priority.”
But some of the commentaries on the centenary of the fire at the factory — where workers produced blouses, then known as shirtwaists — warn against complacency. “The battles that arose in the wake of Triangle over worker safety, worker rights and whether government should regulate business are with us still,” columnist Harold Meyerson said in The Washington Post. He and others cited the deaths last year of 29 miners in an explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, which has been blamed on lax safety measures.
U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis noted in another Post piece that her agency had conducted 374 investigations of clothing factories in the past fiscal year. “In these cases, vulnerable immigrant workers have been deprived of minimum-wage pay, overtime pay and safe working conditions — all the haunting echoes of Triangle,” she said.
The Triangle fire started at the end of the workday and raced through the building’s upper floors. As hundreds of workers — mainly Jewish and Italian immigrant women and girls, the youngest 14 — tried to escape, they found a crucial door apparently locked. Workers, some with their clothes on fire, jumped to their deaths as horrified witnesses, including Perkins, looked on.
“Freakonomics” co-author Stephen Dubner said on “Marketplace” that the factory was “one of this new breed of ‘fireproof’ buildings, which meant it was made of steel and brick that wouldn’t burn and collapse.” But everything inside the building was flammable. Experts later concluded that the fire likely was caused by a cigarette dropped on a pile of cloth scraps.
In response to the outcry over the fire, New York lawmakers quickly passed laws governing the storage and disposal of flammable waste and banning smoking from the shop floor. Other measures passed the following year established codes requiring new buildings to include fireproof stairways and fire escapes.
The findings of a factory safety commission established by the State Legislature, as the PBS documentary “Triangle Fire” pointed out, also spurred passage of a flock of labor laws. They included statutes setting standards for minimum wages and maximum hours, as well as placing restrictions on the use of child labor.
“These pathbreaking state regulations, provoked by the Triangle fire, proved that government could play a powerful role in the lives of ordinary people,” Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen write in The New Republic.
The two writers say business groups vehemently opposed the fire-safety reforms as overly burdensome — the same stance, they say, that industry advocates are now using to oppose regulations covering unsafe workplaces and other dangers to public health.
“It seems like the lessons of the past have to be relearned again,” Dreier and Cohen contend. “That’s why it is important to recall the sordid circumstances in which 146 young women lost their lives” a century ago.
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