From a reader:

Globalization has been the ingenious “get out of jail free” card the corporations have played:

As these “savvy businessmen” go global to freely impose the conditions which appalled America a century ago (The number of confirmed dead from the Bangladesh garment factory collapse and fire Is approaching and will certainly surpass 1000,)

I offer this:

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911

At the time of the fire the only safety measures available for the workers were 27 buckets of water and a fire escape that would collapse when people tried to use it. Most of the doors were locked and those that were not locked only opened inwards and were effectively held shut by the onrush of workers escaping the fire.

As the clothing materials feed the fire workers tried to escape anyway they could. 25 passengers flung themselves down the elevator shaft trying to escape the fire. Their bodies rained blood and coins down onto the employees who made it into the elevator cars. Engine Company 72 and 33 were the first on the scene. To add to the already bleak situation the water streams from their hoses could only reach the 7th floor.

Their ladders could only reach between the 6th and 7th floor. 19 bodies were found charred against the locked doors. 25 bodies were found huddled in a cloakroom. These deaths, although horrible, was not what changed the feelings toward government regulation. Upon finding that they could not use the doors to escape and the fire burning at their clothes and hair, the girls of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, aged mostly between 13 and 23 years of age, jumped 9 stories to their death.

One after another the girls jumped to their deaths on the concrete over one hundred of feet below. Sometimes the girls jumped three and four at a time. On lookers watched in horror as body after body fell to the earth. “Thud — dead; thud — dead; thud — dead; thud — dead. Sixty-two thud — deads. I call them that, because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time, at the same instant,” said United Press reporter William Shephard.

The bodies of teenage girls lined the street below. Blankets that would-be rescuers used ripped at the weight and the speed the bodies were falling. Fire Department blankets were ripped when multiple girls tried to jump into the same blanket. Some girls tried to jump to the ladders that could not reach the ninth floor. None reached the ladders. The fire escape in the rear of the building collapsed and trapped the employees even more.

A wealthy Bostonian who had come to New York for a Columbia University graduate degree, Frances Perkins (April 10, 1882 – May 14, 1965) was having tea nearby on March 25 when she heard the fire engines. She arrived at the scene of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in time to see workers jumping from the windows above.

Her words, spoken a little more than 50 years later, capture her own feelings and those of her contemporaries. “I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere. It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry. Mea culpa! Mea culpa! We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 boys and girls killed in a factory.

This scene motivated Perkins to work for reform in working conditions, especially for women and children. She served on the Committee on Safety of the City of New York as executive secretary, working to improve factory conditions.

Frances Perkins met Franklin D. Roosevelt in this capacity, while he was New York governor, and in 1932, he appointed her as Secretary of Labor, the first woman to be appointed to a cabinet position.

Frances Perkins called the day of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire “the day the New Deal began.”

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The Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union burst into the national consciousness in 1909 when 20,000 shirtwaist makers went on strike in New York City. .

The 1909 strike lasted 14 weeks, Union membership grew to 25,000 by the strike’s end.. Most of the larger factories had settled with the growing union, and conditions for workers seemed to be improving.

But the owners of the Triangle Waist Company, the largest blouse factory in the city at the time, led the opposition to the 1909 strike, hfiring thugs and prostitutes to harass the workers as they picketed.

Triangle was among the few nonunion holdouts when the factory went up in flamesMarch 25 of 1911, killing 146 workers.

“Everyone noticed that the Triangle factory, the one nonunionized shop, was the place of the fire. The company’s refusal to work with the unions was especially poignant, because a decent fire escape, and factory doors that opened outward, had been among the strikers’ demands.

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http://www.laboreducator.org/stevens.htm

http://www.forward.com/articles/136018/

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http://www.csun.edu/~ghy7463/mw2.html

Cornell University – ILR School – The Triangle Factory Fire – Legacy – Legislative Reform

http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/legacy/legislativeReform.html

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/triangle/a/perkins_fire.htm

When I read about the tragedy in Bangladesh, where hundreds of garment workers died when the building collapsed, it reminded me of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Working at NYU, I frequently walked past the building where over 100 immigrant girls perished in a factory fire. The doors were locked. They could not escape. They could jump from the 12th floor or perish in the fire.

Events like these gave birth to the labor movement. Working people didn’t stand a chance until they organized to have a collective voice. The factory owners could treat them like human waste or lock them into their squalid work quarters or pay them as little as possible, and they had no alternative but to take the abuse or lose their job.

Unions changed that. They compelled factory owners to improve working conditions. They used their collective strength to elect officials with a social conscience. Unions changed working conditions for all workers, not just their members, and they enabled working class men and women to join the middle class.

Big business never liked unions. But only in recent decades has big business found a way to escape the legal structures that regulated wages and hours, safety, and working conditions. More and more corporations discovered that they could lower costs and improve profits by outsourcing their work to poor nations. First they fled to Mexico, then to Asia. They move their factories and facilities wherever they can pay the least.

So now we see the same conditions in China, Bangladesh, and other countries that our nation experienced a century or more ago. We see American and global corporations manufacturing their goods wherever wages are lowest (in the factories in Bangladesh, it was $40 a month), with no regard to safety or working conditions or child labor.

We pay a price too, though not so great as the price paid by the factory workers in Bangladesh. We have plentiful cheap goods, but we have lost the good manufacturing jobs that sustained millions of workers. Our leaders say that education will fix everything, and someday everyone will be college-and career-ready, but they forget that schools and colleges don’t create jobs.

I don’t have the answers to all these problems, but I have an uneasy feeling that our elites are getting fatter as the middle-class grows more insecure about the future. As I watch the war against unions, I wonder why so few people remember why unions were created.

And I worry about the disappearance of good middle-class jobs, as they are exported and turned into low-wage work and as they are replaced by technology that requires no workers at all. A friend who is now retired used to supervise a candy plant for a big corporation. It employed nearly 1,000 workers, each of whom supported a family. The same plant now is run by two or three people. Everyone else became superfluous.

Leo Casey at the Shanker Institute drew some parallels between the disaster in Bangladesh and the factory explosion in West, Texas.

I worry for our nation. Some inequality is inevitable. Dramatic inequality is toxic to the spirit.