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.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Greed tops unions. How will this play out in the long run? Not optimistic.
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Don’t forget the factory that blew up in Waco, TX! Blew up same time as Boston Marathon. Where’s the coverage by the news?
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Diane, I’m so glad you wrote this. Many people forget that unions built the middle class and that is being torn down now piece by piece.
I teach about the labor movement in my eighth grade ELA classroom with specific focus on the Triangle fire. My students are both horrified and fascinated by the tragedy, but more than anything, it is making them THINK and causing them to make connections. While I was out grading their state assessment (for seven school days), I had students writing me about the factory collapse in Bangladesh. They saw the connection between the Triangle and Bangladesh immediately and were questioning why on their own. That gives me hope.
Lastly, to show that labor studies is not a dead topic, next Saturday, May 18, the Frances Perkins Forum is hosting a conference on Labor Studies in the Classroom at the UFT Headquarters. Richard Greenwald is our keynote and Robert Forrant from U. Mass will be there to discuss the Bread and Roses strike, as well as many other inspiring educators and speakers. There is still room left for those intersted in attending.
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When will people learn? It’s a shame how the worst events in history are doomed to be repeated by the actions of the power-hungry. Makes one want to move to an island and stay there.
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“Working people didn’t stand a chance until they organized to have a collective voice.”
Thank you Diane for reminding us that if we forget the struggles of the past, we are doomed to repeat them.
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“So now we see the same conditions in China, Bangladesh, and other countries that our. Nation experienced a century or more ago.”
One possibility is that workers become able to bargain for better working conditions and pay overseas, as happened in this country. To the extent that reduced opportunities for labor-cost arbitrage, that could benefit U.S. workers.
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We already see this happening in China. Wages are increasing at a high rate (25% a year in some places). Production is moving back across the pacific or to places were workers are in deeper poverty than those in China, giving the very poorest the opportunity to live a life that materially differs from their great-great-great-great-great-grandparents.
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TE, by your logic, we should ship all our good jobs overseas and start ll over again. As one reader suggested, maybe China and Bangladesh will develop strong unions. And our wage levels will drop to theirs. I think the Germans had a better idea: they preserved their manufacturing jobs for the good of their society and the health of their economy.
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I don’t think that’s the point, Diane. The point is that if wages and benefits rise in China and Bangladesh, it is more expensive to do business there, thus reducing the incentive to replace US workers with Chinese and Bangladeshi workers. This doesn’t mean outsourcing is great or even good for US workers, but it’s part of that process — kind of like thermodynamic equilibrium.
And what happened to our concern about the welfare of Bangladeshi workers? If US jobs move to China and Bangladesh, and if those countries develop strong unions, that’s good for Chinese and Bangladeshi workers. As a US worker, I don’t like that. But I’m lying if I say I have any principled basis for my objection beyond my own self-interest. Do Americans have any moral obligation to acknowledge their privileged status over much of the rest of the world? Do Americans have more rights to good jobs and living standards than the Chinese or Bangladeshis?
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Diane, Teaching Economist (TE) is unable to see any benefit from even a shade of European style labor policies. Maybe it’s because TE does not see the necessity of a large, fat midle class as the best proof of a real, sustainable, and viable democracy.
Globalization has become, far too often, a euhpemism, for outsourcing and cheaper labor markets, all to benefit the ownership class far more than the consumer, who also used to be known as the citizen here in the States. . . .
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Dr. Ravitch,
I don’t think of them as “our jobs”, so do not think of technological change and globalization as taking something that a person is entitled to away from them. Perhaps because I routinely work with citizens of foreign countries I tend to think of them as having equal moral standing to citizens of the United States.
Robert Rendo
I see the value of European style labor policies, but I also see the cost. Strong job protections are very valuable to the folks that have a job, very damaging to those that want to get a job. If you make it very hard to fire an employee, you will make it very hard to hire an employee. The firm will need to be sure it can usefully employ the person for the next couple of decades in order to make the hiring decision. Dr. Ravitch looks to Germany (perhaps overlooking the very painful labor market reforms beginning in 2003), while my concern is with Spain’s youth unemployment rate of over 50%. Insiders keep their jobs while destroying the next generation’s future.
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From The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911 to the Bangeladesh horrors of 21st century, apparently corporate business mentality, ethics and practices have not changed at all the past 100 years. Unions did little to impact a change of big business modus operendi. Apparently they still demonstrate the same lack of social conscience or personal morality as they did in 1911. If we are to take seriously the Citizen United decision that Corporations are indeed, legally endowed with the same “personhood’ rights as human citizens, then we need to also take seriously that they be held to the same level of personal responsibility and moral obligation as human citizens. Where are the prosecutions and jail sentences for knowingly assisting and abetting in homicide and reckless endangerment? Where is the outrage from Capitol Hill…or or from US Unions…or from the livingrooms of America? I am thoroughly disgusted.
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Thank you Diane for this column which reminds us that the confluence of the union movement and ever strengthening universal public schooling in the US created the greatest Middle Class in history….mostly all gone now. As many mentioned, greed is the winner.
New brain studies show differences in brain structure between political conservatives and liberals. Are we born with the prediliction toward greed, or toward cooperative sharing, or is it learned? The many posts on your site are almost all consistent with a human, humane, supportive instinct of most teachers.
What makes a university student become a teacher rather than a banker or hedge fund manager? Brain chemistry, home environment, life’s lessons???
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Worker safety would seem to be a motherhood issue… but this article about TX indicates that those in charge in TX think otherwise:
Basically, Governor Perry and the town fathers in West, TX where the explosion occurred are both proud of Texas’ business friendly reputation and fearful of any regulation…
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Yes, absolutely right–Diane’s post, the comments, and the linked article by Leo Casey. I made some other remarks on this sort of industrial tragedy in “Killing workers: business and consumption as usual?” at http://politicswestchesterview.wordpress.com/.
It’s an age-old struggle, now made more complicated by industry’s ability to move production to the weakest link and play off states and even countries against each other. For those companies, profit is more important than anything, including lives.
It’s hard to see how education can combat that “divide and conquer” mentality, which is also destroying our own national government’s ability to solve even the most pressing problems. Of course we fight to advance education, but as regularly pointed out on this site, as powerful interests shift education toward corporate-oriented charter schools and publicly-financed private schools, the odds get harder for educators to overcome.
We need to think within the framework of Paolo Freire, who held that literacy leads to political education. As our government-imposed system moves toward multiple choice testing and more limited subject matter, our country loses the very thing that can save it: literacy in the broader sense.
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Blondie:
Cuz the man from mars is through with cars he’s eatin bars. Yeah wall to wall, door to door, hall to hall he’s gonna eat ’em all. Rapture. Be pure. Take a tour through the sewer. Don’t strain your brain. Paint the train. You’ll be singin in the rain.
Said don’t stop to punk rock.
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I too, thought of the Triangle Shirt Factory fire, when I heard of the collapse in Bangladesh. I am a credentialed teacher and a licensed social worker. Social Work in the U.S. was created out of the fires of the Triangle Shirt Factory fire (I also grew up in Greenwich Village). Union bashing, slashing and destroying public education, devastation of the environment, child and adolescent abuse, all come together in this incident. We must think internationally and stay strong in our work towards SOCIAL JUSTICE!!!
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I suspect that big obstacles prevent the growth of powerful labor unions in places like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and China, that would raise the standard of living of the woefully exploited workers there and protect their physical well-being, indirectly aiding the plight of American workers:
(1) Religious (Muslim or Hindu) movements that would find that sort of thing anathema;
(2) Complete and utter sell-outs by supposedly “Communist” or “Socialist” governments or movements that are nothing of the sort that in fact simply help exploit workers, despite all their rhetoric to the contrary.
(3) The power and ability of the wealthiest capitalists in the world to move their operations to whichever nation has the weakest working class and the least amount of protection for workers, and the least amount of regulation of any sort.
Until those are addressed, don’t expect that workers in Asia, Africa and elsewhere will be able to fight back effectively.
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It’s been happening here for decades. The Great A&P Tea Company “broke” the union by shutting stores and reopening as Super Fresh, and renegotiating with the union. Same “company” under a new name. My brother was employed by them at the time and it took him 15 years at Super Fresh to reach the rate of pay he had under A&P.
All perfectly legal.
A similar story is unfolding within what was the Hostess Baking Company ( think “Twinkies”).
Unions were integrally related to the growth of the middle class, and the strong economy that paralleled it.
Could it be that most of us don’t see injustices in the workplace until we feel them?
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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/
.
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
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There is a connection between the assault on labor globally and the assault on public education nationally. The public institutions which are so frequently defended on this site as bastions of democracy were as much the product of workers’ demands for a better life as they were industry’s demands for better workers. Unions and their cousins, the public schools, were concessions made largely in times of crisis that were gradually and then more rapidly constrained as new problems emerged. Corporate America’s lust, in a post-industral landscape, for the billions that schools represent is the latest chapter in a conflict over the ends to which society’s wealth are directed. The problem is that in the wake of socialism’s numerous failures the majority who pass through public schools do not grasp how essential to their well being the schools and other public institutions have been. They remain deeply invested in an American Dream which suggests that success is more individual than collective. We have to persuade them otherwise . . .
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I think you are right. Many people refuse to see how we all have benefited from collective efforts. I believe the “rugged individualism” is a myth. In the earliest days of America the people heavily relied on each other for daily survival. They pooled resources to survive. It’s all a myth. The expansion westward would never have happened without the collective effort of the military, etc.
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I, too, thought it a horrible irony that in March, 2011–100 years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire–the same inhumane working and living conditions, creating death and misery, were (and, of course, are) being perpetuated in third world countries, where labor is cheap and lives don’t matter (to American corporations).
Something that struck me, though, linking this situation to the big bu$ine$$ of education privatization: one of our Pear$on sample reading comprehension practice assessments (with extended response) was the true story of a young man in such a country (perhaps Bangladesh–I cannot remember) whose family owed a debt to the government. The only way to pay this debt was to indenture one of their children to work in a sweat shop. This young man–though still a teenager–grew into a unifying leader who even went to the United Nations, where he spoke out on child labor.
He had created a worldwide movement for child labor laws. When he returned to his country, he was assassinated. The extended response question asked students to write about what he did, how it affected the world and what they could do to make the world better. Again, a Pear$on assessment sample!
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Labor unions are needed when situations are like they are, however unions get too greedy and become like the companies they fight.
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At what point do you blame the members? If members are complacent (unlike Chicago’s union), then they are part of the problem. Many people in the education profession are afraid and are waiting for the change to come without doing much. They are waiting for the reformers to change. They won’t change as long a there is a gravy train to ride.(public tax dollars and bought out politicians) If all teachers in one state came together and put up a H@#$ of a fight, them change could some. They have the ammunition they need (An entire school class went through NCLB and RTTT and no magic bullet was created to end the achievement gap) They have the evidence to disprove the reformers. Charter schools are a joke. The evidence is there.
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Calvin Klein, H&M shame on you, and shame on us here in the US that have a history of not paying true cost for quality work or oil. Where are the boycotts, where is the pressure on these corporations. yes these companies now signed an agreement going forward,but we should not honor their greed and desire to escape responsibility.
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