The Triangle Fire: The Shirtwaist Lack

Frances Perkins, a survivor from the Shirtwaist Factory Fire quotes “Moved by this sense of stricken guilt, we banded ourselves together to find a way by law to prevent this kind of disaster.” Frances Perkins became secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and this quote said by Perkins “something must be done. We’ve got to turn this into some kind of victory, some kind of constructive action,” helped new workplace safety standards into law in the state of New York. The benefits that I would like the audience to see is how workplace safety is important by learning about the history of regulation, OSHA, and workers compensation.

In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Montag, the protagonist and book burner, battles between the light and dark sides of society, first with Beatty, his boss, and the government and then with Clarisse, a neighbor girl and Faber, an English professor. Montag is stuck in the dark burning books and is ignorant to the world around him. He moves towards greater awareness when he meets Clarisse and is awakened to the wonders of deep thought and books. Finally, he risks his life by trying to save the books.

One of the main reasons the fire took such a psychological toll on the New Yorkers was because of the workers jumping to there deaths. One witness even remarked the event saying quote 'I know a new sound a terrible sound the sound of a body hitting the pavement". The inferno was also not an uncommon occurrence the triangle shirt was burned before the tragedy to collect insurance money. Knowing this information, many Jewish and women workers went on strike to secure improved working conditions. There strike in fact proved successful with the New York state legislature creating the Factory Investigating Commission. Another result of the fire was the creation of the American Society of Safety Engineers. Which was Designed for all buildings to fall under the code to make them safer?

In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair explains how horrible working conditions were for people in the meatpacking industry. Have you ever wondered what effect Upton Sinclair had on American industry? The Jungle is about the poor working conditions and the very poor sanitation in 1906. We will also be talking about the backstory behind Upton Sinclair.

Working conditions in the late nineteenth century improved with the introduction of labor activists. Labor activists tried for better conditions in multiple ways, the most common being the formation of unions. There were two primary types of workers in unions: the more-radicalized strikers, and the passive mediators. Samuel Gompers, an American labor activist, was an example of the latter. Samuel talked about corporate change in his letter Letter to the Hon. Peter Grosscup. He wrote “ Ask these whether the conqueror (monopoly) cares whether his trophy (the laborers) is destroyed or preserved. Ascertain from employers whether the laborer is not regarded the same as a machine, thrown out as soon as all the work possible has been squeezed out of him.” Once a worker would lose his maximum efficiency, he would be replaced by the influx of immigrants entering the United States. There was no idea of tenure, only a merit concept. Furthermore, in order to grow fiscally, it was best for corporations to avoid paying for or adhering to safety precautions. For example, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of New York City in March 25, 1911, was a fire in which one hundred forty-six people died. The massive death count came from the lack of security precautions. For the company to keep a maximum amount of efficiency, workers wouldn’t be allowed breaks. To enforce this no-breaks rules, most doors in the building were locked, which trapped and killed most workers during the fire. In an newspaper interview Fire Chief Edward Croker said “Well, from what we could find—what was left of that place up there—I don’t think there was any doubt there was a partition inside of the doorway leading out into the Green Street side of that building, and from the indication of the number of people we found where that partition was, that door was locked, and the door that

Indeed, the laws were meant for the workers in the factories to have safer working conditions, but it never really worked out. Records vary, but it is known that as many as 35,000 workers killed and another million injured on the job in 1900. (Lutz,

Firemen searched the building searching if their was any evidence on how the fire was started and discovered something even more important. They figured out that during the fire the doors were locked which prevented the girls to get out of the building. “... we never went out the front door. We always went one by one out the back. There was a man there searching, because the people were afraid we would take something, so that door was always locked” (Leap for Life, Leap for Death). The front doors of the factory would always be locked because the owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck thought one of the employees might steal something from the factory. When they tried to go downstairs, the flames of the fire burned them that prevented them to try leave the building. The factory owners were charged for manslaughter after the fire. A few years later they were acquitted and let out of

It was owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. The factory employed young children and women who had poor conditions to say the least. The factory had doors that locked from the outside to prevent workers from taking too many bathroom breaks. The building had four elevators, only one being fully functional, but in order to reach it one would have to walk down a long narrow hallway. There were two stairwells down to the bottom floor. One being locked for safety purposes; the other only being able to be opened from the outside. The one fire escape would not have been adequate enough to sufficiently evacuate the workers. Blanck and Harris were known to have burned down their factories for the fire insurance, so they refused to install a sprinkler system. The fire was started from a rag bin. Someone tried to put the fire out with a hose, but the hose was rotted and the valve rusted shut. People tried to escape, but the elevator broke down. The doors to the stairwells were locked, and many girls, in a desperate attempt jumped to their deaths. 145 girls and women either burned alive or suffocated. Despite there being sufficient evidence, the courts failed to indict the owners on manslaughter charges. To prevent further disasters from happening, the Sullivan-Hoey Fire Protection law was passed, which was a crucial win for the

The Fifth Avenue Association of the City of New York, the Committee on Safety of the City of New York, among other organizations, worked together and presented issues before the Governor and Legislature of the state. The state government then passed an Act, which created a Commission. Said Commission was appointed to investigate the fire, Harris and Blanck, and their factory's conditions. As one can imagine, this investigation did not bode well for Harris and Blanck. Prior to the Commission’s actions it was already known that the factory was a menace to those who worked within its walls. According to the Preliminary Report of the Factory Investigating Commission, “There were “lack of precautions to prevent fire, inadequate fire-escape facilities, insanitary (sic) conditions that were insidiously undermining the health of the workers were found existing everywhere” (Wagner, 1912, p. 1). The factory was in desperate need of investigating and

Another result of the Triangle Factory fire that resulted in change in the American workplace was the attempts of labor unions and strikes. Prior to the fire, in 1909, one of the more notable strikes dubbed the "Uprising of 20,000" was organized primarily by female immigrant garment workers because of the awful conditions, long hours, and low wages they were made to work in due to the lack of options available to them (Pool, 2012). The primary challenge was to get attention paid to the mistreatment of immigrant workers. While there were short term agreements for their demands, the strike ultimately failed, however where it did succeed was exposing poor working conditions and stirring a debate about what counted as public and private (Pool,

The detrimental Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is considered to be one of the most tragic disasters in history. On March 25th, 1911, a fire broke out and killed 146 garment workers who were mostly women. These women worked countless hours with low wages and inhumane working conditions in a factory. Even though this event was tragic, the triangle shirtwaist fire helped to shape the new world for the better. The multitude of workers trapped within the inferno to their demise was the final straw for the mistreatment of America’s workers. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire led to imperative reforms that sought for adequate conditions for workers and the advent of the Progressive Era. (Source 2).

The workers were often subjected to sweltering heat in the summer and frigid conditions in the winter. But, that was not it, at the time there were no laws in place that required businesses to ensure their employees' safety, and this regularly lead to many injuries and fatalities in the workplace on a daily basis. There was not a single work place that did not have injured or mutilated employees, and this was due to the unsafe working conditions of the factories, “Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one… There were men who worked in the cooking rooms… in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour.” (109). However the dangerous working conditions were not the only reason for the nightmare like conditions of the work place. Another factor was the constant speeding up that the workers were subjected to. The workers felt that the factory managers were “… speeding them up and grinding them into pieces…” (76), which was not far from the disturbing truth. For, the inhabitants of Packingtown did not live this American dream too long with the severe conditions that were imposed upon

In the film Escape Fire the Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, there were many insightful examples of why our Unites States healthcare revolves around paying more and getting less. The system is designed to treat diseases rather than preventing them and promoting wellness. In our healthcare industry, there are many different contributors that provide and make up our system. These intermediaries include suppliers, manufacturers, consumers, patients, providers, policy and regulations. All these members have a key role in the functionality of the health care industry; however, each role has its positives and negatives. Each person with an occupation in the healthcare industry is doing their designated job as assigned, but it’s evident that the system’s design is flawed to its core.

They lied and said they had the doors were “always unlocked.” They were not trustworthy witnesses. According to Rosey Safran, a Jewish immigrant from Austria, said, “If the union had had its way, we would have been safe in spite of the fire, for two of the union’s demands were, adequate fire escapes on factory buildings and open doors giving free access from factories to the street. “ The owners already went up against the union with safety demands. Most likely they would have agreed with lower safety standards as Yglesias asserts, considering they didn’t care about the sanitation and purity of the workplace in its current

Low-cost houses can be found in some parts of the U.K. Unfortunately, the wages are too low, thus leading to the collapse of property ownership. The construction of more homes has been limited by inadvertent construction where few people have the interest and capacity to build new structures. In addition, private developers bid for land based on the price they intend to sell the newly constructed houses. Therefore, the construction activities reduce once the prices fall.