These days, there is at least some emphasis on safe working conditions at most reputable corporations. However, this was not always the case. About 100 years ago, it was not uncommon for people to die while on the job. There is a common statistic from that period which claims that about 100 U.S workers used to die every day on average. This was not just common for factories. It was unsafe to work on ships, in mines, on trains, etc… When one considers this, it becomes much easier to see how a tragedy like the Triangle Factory fire could have occurred. It is commonly referred to as one of the worst workplace disasters ever to happen in the U.S.
Around 1911, there were a lot of blouse factories in New York City, but the Triangle Factory was one of the largest. It employed around 500 people mostly comprised of young immigrant women, and existed on floors eight, nine, and ten of the Ash building on the northern corner of Washington Square East. It made shirtwaists for stylish young women. Unfortunately for the workers, working there meant long hours, little pay, unpaid lunches, and no breaks. The female workers were sometimes followed to the bathroom and hurried back to their seats. The factory itself is often described as overcrowded and stuffy. Bins piled high with shirt scraps occupied a lot of the room. Those scraps of cotton that filled pretty much the whole room ended up being the real killer in the end. According to one of the girls, Clara Lemlich, “The bosses in the shops are hardly what you would call educated men, and the girls to them are part of the machines they are running. They yell at the girls and they "call them down" even worse than I imagine the Negro slaves were in the South”.
Besides all of that, the owners of the company had made some changes that even then were not up to code. They were worried that the employees would steal from them, so they restricted contact with the exits. All of the workers were supposed to take the same exit when they left for the day. That exit was on the same side of the building as Green Street. They set up this partition of sorts so that they could send through one worker at a time and she would be searched for stolen tools or scraps of fabric. There actually was another stairway leading out of the factory and several passenger elevators on the other side of the building, but they were only supposed to be used by management. There was also another stairway as defined by the building code, but it was really a rusted old fire escape on the back of the building that could not hold weight well.
In 1909, the women in the factory participated in a strike to do something about the unsafe and inhumane working conditions. Unfortunately, the owners had the backing of Tammany Hall, so they were able to put down the strike with not much of a fuss. Still, the next year, the owners agreed to a few changes. They agreed to higher wages and shorter hours, but the factory itself remained unsafe.
On March 25, 1911, a worker on the eighth floor noticed a small fire in his scrap bin. Nobody really know how this fire began. There are theories about a match or cigarette being accidentally thrown in the bin, but nobody is really sure. It was around closing and the man had been just about to leave. Cotton is a very flammable substance, so what had started out as a small fire was fanned into a sizeable in just a few seconds. Some of the workers grabbed the fire pails and attempted to dump water on the flames but it was spreading too quickly. The manager told the workers to get the fire hoses out, still trying for containment rather than evacuation. However, the uninspected hoses had no water pressure to put out the flames.
At this point, people began to try to find a way out, the chances of survival ended up depending greatly upon the proximity of the person to the exit. Some of the people ran to the doors on the Washington Side, but they opened inward and the workers were squeezed against the doors so tightly that they could not open them. Other workers tried to get out through the Green Street door, but the partition system bottlenecked the flow of traffic, so that way was too slow for everyone to make it. Still others tried to get out through the passenger elevators. It remains unclear which floors the elevator operators stopped up at and when, but it is guessed that they visted the eighth floor once and the tenth floor once or twice. The tenth floor was where management worked and many more of them were able to make it out alive than on the other two floors. Some of them got out through the elevators, but others got out by going to the roof where NYU law students had ladders to get them safely to the nearby buildings.
Some of the workers tried to get out using the fire escape, but it only went from the tenth floor to the second floor. When workers attempted to use it to escape, the entire structure detached from the building and came crashing down into the courtyard below. One of the most notorious facts about the fire was that on the ninth floor, some of the doors to the stairs had been locked. The elevators were packed with the people from the tenth floor, so it would come to the ninth floor, but nobody would be able to get on. Some of the workers slid down the elevator cables, to varying degrees of success. About 80 of the people on the ninth floor, seeing no other way to get out, jumped out of the window. Even when the fire department got there, the ladders that they had could only go up to the sixth floor. Their nets were also unsuccessful. Not all of the girls were choosing to jump. Sometimes, the push of the crowd would just send them over the edge of the window.
Afterwards, people looked for someone to blame. The district attorney charged the two owners of the factory with willful negligence. However, there were some differing testimonies about whether or not the door on the Washington Square Park Side of the building was locked intentionally or not. In the end, the owners went free. A Factory Investigation Commission was formed to create a list of things that the Triangle Factory had been missing like fire walls, sprinklers, and fire alarms. Most factories back then did not have these things in them, but in the three years following the fire, that began to change. 36 new state laws were passed about improving working conditions and labor protection for workers. The last survivor of the fire, Rose Freedman, died in 2001 at the age of 107, and her granddaughter continues to tell her story.
No comments:
Post a Comment