Frances Perkins and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/march-25-2023?r=28fgd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=emailBy Heather Cox Richardson
On March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins was visiting with a friend who lived near Washington Square in New York City when they heard fire engines and screams. They rushed out to the street to see what the trouble was. A fire had broken out in a garment factory on the upper floors of a building on Washington Square, and the blaze ripped through the lint in the air. The only way out was down the elevator, which had been abandoned at the base of its shaft, or through an exit to the roof. But the factory owner had locked the roof exit that day because, he later testified, he was worried some of his workers might steal some of the blouses they were making.
...Perkins had few illusions about industrial America: she had worked in a settlement house in an impoverished immigrant neighborhood in Chicago and was the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for workers. But even she was shocked by the scene she witnessed on March 25....
She later explained that although their mission was to stop factory fires, “we went on and kept expanding the function of the commission 'till it came to be the report on sanitary conditions and to provide for their removal and to report all kinds of unsafe conditions and then to report all kinds of human conditions that were unfavorable to the employees, including long hours, including low wages, including the labor of children, including the overwork of women, including homework put out by the factories to be taken home by the women. It included almost everything you could think of that had been in agitation for years. We were authorized to investigate and report and recommend action on all these subjects.”
And they did. Al Smith was the speaker of the house when they published their report, and soon would become governor. Much of what the commission recommended became law.
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Profit over all. 
is believed to have caused the deaths of many millions, even hundreds of millions, including by state-facilitated starvation? I'm assuming it wasn't for profit.
If DeSantis were dictator of the United Socialist States of America, and people like Scott Walker and tRump in charge of the committees overseeing western states, would there be no atrocities and injustices against workers?
Authoritarian management styles are death on efficiency and typically do great harm to profit margins, including costing the best employees who go elsewhere -- I've witnessed this personally, but authoritarian types consider it necessary and worth it. And this is only one of many forms of human failing that lead to abuse of others, but I mention it because authoritarian structure and management are intrinsic to universalist socioeconomic systems that seek to do away with business profits.
still pretty much 2nd class citizens!
It's at the top of Bear Mtn in New York.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=perkins+tower
