Movements today are a part of a legacy of extraordinary actions taken by ordinary people. Tapping into our own labor history provides us with a blueprint for action in today’s turbulent world.
On March 25th, 1911, a fire began in the scrap bins under a cutter’s table on the 8th floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Within minutes, the entire floor was engulfed in flames, spreading to the 9th floor and 10th floors — where 200 plus workers were just finishing up to go home for the night. By the time workers were alerted to the conflagration, options for escaping the fire were few. By the time the fire was brought under control, 146 workers were dead. New York City saw sweeping reforms in the aftermath of the fire, catapulting some pro-reform lobbyists like Francis Perkins all the way to the highest halls of government with the introduction of the New Deal 20 years later.
Near the 114th anniversary of this tragedy, Mel sat down with labor historian Dr. Erik Loomis, professor at the University of Rhode Island and author of his forthcoming book, “Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice” to talk about the struggle for better working conditions in the garment industry in New York City, the fire itself and the reforms enacted afterwards, and why it’s important to learn from our own labor history in this current moment.
Mel Buer: In the early 20th century, garment production was the largest manufacturing business in America. These garment production factories were staffed by hundreds and thousands of workers. What do these conditions look like for workers at the time who worked in specifically the garment industry in New York?
Erik Loomis: It’s rough work. You had a mostly immigrant workforce, particularly Jewish immigrants, some Italians as well. A lot of the early sweatshop industry in New York was home-based. By the 1905 or so, that’s beginning to shift to what we would think of more as a modern sweatshop, and that was a very exploitative workforce. They hired mostly women thinking that they could control them. Work weeks could be 65 to 75 hours a week, but also tremendously unstable. The women worked basically between $3 to $10 a week for all of these hours, which was poverty wages.
Factory owners really tried to control workers’ movements. Locking doors was super common. Fear of these workers stealing cloth and things like that would lead to searches, requesting permission to use very unsanitary and disgusting bathrooms, fines all the time at work. Being required to supply your own supplies such as needles and things like this. Sexual harassment of these workers was a real problem.
Mel Buer: This brings us to a remarkable labor action that happened in 1909. In response to worsening conditions, there was a massive strike in the garment district that lasted close to a year, that was led primarily by women. Over 20,000 garment workers took to the streets and they walked out of dozens of factories in the garment district on strike. They called it the Uprising of the 20,000, and it was considered an opening salvo and a new struggle for better working conditions in the industrialized sort of industries in New York City.
Erik Loomis: The union they had that was in that industry, it was called the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, or the ILG. But ironically, the leadership of the union was basically all men, and even despite the name, they weren’t really that comfortable with masses of women in the workforce. And so in New York, in those weeks and months leading up to this strike, young organizers, mostly Jewish women, are organizing.
There’s a big meeting in New York, and the point of the meeting, in part, is for labor leaders to try to cut the strike off. So the ILG members, the president, and other leading figures show up and urge caution. It’s like two hours of these guys getting up and talking and going on and on trying to undermine what they saw as a rebellion of low skilled workers that they feared would undermine the very limited gains that they had made in other parts of the garment industry.
And finally, after listening to this, Clara Lemlich, a young woman, marches up to the stage. And in Yiddish says, “I am a working girl, one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms. What we are here to decide is whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now.” And she simply overwhelmed all those men on the stage. The workers walked out the next
Mel Buer: So what was the outcome of the strike? What happened to these workers?
Erik Loomis: Yeah, I mean, the answer is in a sense, it is both a win and a loss. After about 11 weeks, workers begin to, they start trickling back, because the ILG still didn’t really support the strike, and they didn’t have the ability to have a big strike fund, so they don’t win a union shop. They don’t win a lot of workplace safety gains. But the manufacturers do agree to some real concessions. The work week drops to 52 hours in most of these factories that were four paid holidays a year. You don’t have to buy your own work materials anymore. And so the workers themselves feel very empowered by what happened.
Mel Buer: Many of these workers who picketed outside the Triangle Factory are some of the ones who walked into work on March 25th, 1911 and did not come out.
The fire begins right around the time of the closing bell. We’re not quite sure exactly what got thrown into the scrap bucket, but it was probably a still lit match or a cigarette butt that gets thrown into one of the buckets under the table and it lights a fire, and I think, within less than 10 minutes, that entire floor is on fire.
Erik Loomis: It starts on the 8th floor. And everybody on the eighth floor gets out. They call up to the 10th floor, that the office and owners are on, and those guys are all able to get out. But in the panic, people forgot to call the 9th floor. And within just a few minutes, you have this raging fire, and the doors are locked to get out. Some workers do get out via the elevator, but then you have 146 workers still stuck up there, and there’s nothing that they can do. They try to open the door, they’re looking for the key, nobody can find it, and they end up facing a choice of burning to death or jumping from the ninth floor. And then they all die. So you have 146 dead workers.
This was not particularly uncommon. The numbers were high, but you had more workers than that die in coal mines pretty frequently. Other garment fires that were hardly uncommon. T
So as you pointed out, it’s an afternoon. It is a nice day. People are strolling around. People are just walking around, and all of a sudden plumes of smoke will rise up and all these people head over to see what’s up. And what’s up is a mass death incident.
And what made this different for our American history is not the numbers, it’s the fact that this became a public event. People saw the people making their clothes die, and that makes an enormous difference in the response of a nation that had traditionally been quite indifferent to workplace death.
Mel Buer: Tens of thousands of folks were on the streets watching. This is a really horrendous thing for a lot of people to witness. In the days after the event when they lined the victims up for identification at the pier, there were tens of thousands of people there.
Erik Loomis: But part of the legacy of Triangle is interesting because it kind of shifts from a worker story to a middle class performer story. Francis Perkins is there, and she’s already involved in some of these issues, but she gets really motivated to become a much more active labor reformer, and of course later will become the first female cabinet member, Secretary of Labor under FDR for his 12 years. But the changes that come are not really about workplace activism. The union election process is something that kind of has some things that come out of this. But in the immediate aftermath, there’s serious investigations that happen. And what it leads to are important things around fire safety, building safety, things like this.
Mel Buer: What are some ways, in your experience, that workers can kind of, with a clear eye, see toward a pathway really engendering more political will for better worker legislation?
Erik Loomis: I think there needs to be a lot more internal political organizing within unions. I think this is a serious problem in the contemporary framework. A lot of unions are not really doing a lot of political education. And we see this in the kinds of the ways in which Trump has made inroads in the working class.
Back then you had the level of political education. If you read union newsletters just as an example, they’re engaging in very significant political education, helping workers understand their position in society. That could lead to serious political action supporting candidates. And so that stuff can make just an enormous difference. But in some ways, it has to start with unions doing the work themselves.
Mel Buer: I’ve been feeling pretty heartened by the amount of new independent organizing that has been happening. I really hope that it’ll continue and there’s ways in which we can begin to become more militant in a new generation and to allow these more militant, younger folks to really push forward policy and education that they’re bringing into the labor movement. But we have an uphill battle.
Erik Loomis: It’s worth noting Clara Lemlich had an uphill battle, too. Union leadership was really nervous about young people coming and taking over the movement and they didn’t really support them when they did, and it just didn’t matter. Lemlich did it anyway, and she spent the rest of her life as this incredible organizer doing all sorts of things.
I think it’s important to understand for younger organizers that the idea that the power structure, even within the labor movement, isn’t going to roll over for you. You just do it anyway.
This episode of the Working People Podcast was published on March 27.
