Triangle Factory Fire Reflections: We All Suffer When Women Workers are Ignored
Today, over a century after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, it’s America’s nurses and healthcare workers, overwhelmingly women, putting everything at risk. Above: A ghostly reminder of what happened on March 25, 1911. Photo by Joe Maniscalco
By Bob Hennelly
This week, a permanent memorial at the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City will be dedicated to the mass casualty event that killed 146 mostly young immigrant women garment workers on March 25, 1911 and sparked a national movement for workplace safety and worker rights.
The 11:30 a.m. dedication will be held on Wednesday Oct. 11, at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street in Greenwich Village. The Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, Workers United, SEIU, the NYC Central Labor Council, Acting US Secretary of Labor Julie Su, and NYS Gov. Kathy Hochul will be on hand for the commemoration.
Hopefully, it will also be a recommitment to a life and death struggle that we saw so many lose during the COVID pandemic. Thousands upon thousands of healthcare professionals, first responders, transport sector employees and other essential workers lost their lives and put their families health at risk due to their occupational exposures to the airborne infectious disease.
Not being prepared for COVID had some real consequences, particularly for healthcare professionals who bore the brunt of the collapse of infection control which our for-profit healthcare system wants us to forget about. The Guardian newspapers and Kaiser Health News reported that 3,600 hospital workers died in the first year of the pandemic due to their occupational exposure. Seven hundred of them were from New York and New Jersey. Two-thirds of them were people of color.
To this day, the U.S. has no registry for this honor roll. And in America, what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed. Short staff and even the basics like N-95 masks, thanks to decades of cost cutting and profit taking, brought the world’s wealthiest nation to its knees.
What’s often not fully appreciated about the Triangle Fire is what a crucible for labor unrest that period was in lower Manhattan before WWI. This overwhelmingly female workforce was paid about $6 dollars a week and worked at least 12 hours a day, seven days a week — and they wouldn’t settle for being victims.
The Triangle workers who had to jump several stories to their deaths because the factory owners, who were staunchly anti-union, had operated the site with blocked access to exits. The Triangle owners resisted signing a union contract, unlike other garment factory owners who settled with the garment workers after their 1909 general strike that shut down the industry in New York City when 20,000 garment workers, mostly women, took to the streets.
Ironically, sixteen months before the fire, garment workers had made labor history emerging from their four-month strike with recognition of their union, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union [ILGWU], as well as a 20 percent raise.
The owners of the Triangle garment factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris — also known as the “Shirtwaist Kings” — were acquitted of manslaughter. Yet, they were forever condemned in the court of public opinion, which was informed by the disclosure that they had previously had fires at that Triangle site and that their Diamond Waist Company plant they had also burned twice before.
In the civil lawsuits that followed on behalf of the surviving families paid out roughly $75 per victim, several of whom were only 14-years-old at the time of their death. Over 100 of the victims were Jewish.
Today, over a century later, it’s America’s nurses and healthcare workers, overwhelmingly women, putting everything at risk trying to hold America’s healthcare conglomerates accountable for safer staffing ratios that have been documented to promote infection control, improve patient outcomes, and reduce workplace injuries.
Earlier this year, at the actual anniversary for the Triangle Fire, Nancy Hagans, RN, president of the New York State Nurses Association, told the crowd NYSNA’s loss of several dozen members to COVID helped to galvanize the rank and file to go out on a strike that produced a landmark contract. In addition to agreeing to substantial wage gains, the private sector hospitals agreed to maintain more robust nurse to patient ratios, which have been well documented to improve patient outcomes, better maintain infection control while reducing workplace injuries.
“After losing dozens of our colleagues in the deadly battle against COVID and after seeing so much pain and loss that was preventable, NYSNA nurses gained the courage to fight for what we know is right,” Hagans told the large crowd. “I can’t think of a better way to honor the legacy of the women and the girls who perished in the Triangle Fire. Like they did over a hundred years ago, we turned tragedy into action. We fought for a better world for ourselves and those who will one day walk in our shoes.”
This past weekend, tens of thousands of union nurses and healthcare workers ended their three-day strike against Kaiser Permanente in several states. This week, the United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 entered the third month of their strike for safer staffing at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, whose “non-profit” parent RWJBarnabas paid its CEO $16 million in the second year of the pandemic.
Work shouldn’t be a death sentence, yet a quarter of a century into the 21st century for thousands it is. And while it’s well documented that unionized workers enjoy better workplace safety protections, actual union density is hovering just above 10 percent, an all-time low, and well below the close to a third of American workers just after WWII.
In 2021, without really factoring in COVID, more than 5,000 workers died on the job. Another 120,000 workers died prematurely from a disease they had contracted as a consequence of their employment, according to the AFL-CIO's 32nd annual report, Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect.
The AFL-CIO's annual 240-page research report is a national and state-by-state profile of worker safety and health data points from 2021 but has very limited COVID data because very little was collected by the agencies tracking workplace deaths.
The only government data on occupational COVID deaths was kept by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for nursing homes. Since June 2020, 3,009 nursing home workers have died from COVID with the country averaging 18 nursing home worker COVID deaths per week, according to the AFL-CIO research report.
"The true impact of COVID-19 infections due to workplace exposures is unknown," the AFL-CIO asserted. "Limited data show that more than 1.5 million nursing home workers have been infected."
Before COVID became a mass death event, nurses unions warned management and public health officials about the CDC’s decision to loosen N-95 masking requirements to preserve the inventory of PPE the nation had failed to stockpile. They warned that they would die and that their hospitals would become a vector for the fatal infectious disease.
Both things happened.
Even before the pandemic, the same healthcare unions warned that the level of staffing for nurses was not keeping up with the general increase in patient acuity. Now, the United States is in the midst of a marked decline in America’s life expectancy.
Over a century after Triangle, workers are still being ignored by a power structure that all too often opts to protect wealth and its accumulation at any cost.
Just this last week, the U.S. Department of Labor alleged that R.M. Palmer Co., a Pennsylvania candy maker, had ignored concerns raised by its employees about a gas leak that resulted in a catastrophic blast on March 24, 2023, that leveled the factory and killed seven workers.
"RM Palmer stands by its safety program and policies and has already contested the OSHA citations in this matter,” the company said in a statement. “The Company disputes each of the citations and contends that the agency had no basis to issue these citations as stated. "Until the NTSB’s investigation is complete, there is simply no basis to evaluate OSHA’s statement that an evacuation would have prevented the seven tragic deaths that occurred."
“The department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration opened an investigation and learned R.M. Palmer Co. did not remove workers from the manufacturing plant despite workers’ concerns about what OSHA later determined was a natural gas leak,” according to the DOL’s press release. “The agency cited the company under its general duty clause for not evacuating workers. OSHA also cited R.M. Palmer for not marking emergency exit signs clearly, using flexible cords improperly and for recordkeeping violations.”
"Seven workers will never return home because the R.M. Palmer Co. did not evacuate the facility after being told of a suspected gas leak," OSHA Area Director Kevin Chambers in Harrisburg, Pa., wrote in a statement. "The company could have prevented this horrific tragedy by following required safety procedures."
The company was fined just $44,000 by OSHA.