The mind-set that survived the Triangle Shirtwaist fire

[n2doc]

By Harold Meyerson, Tuesday, March 22, 7:06 PM
The seamstresses were just getting off work that Saturday, some of them singing a new popular song, “Every Little Movement (Has a Meaning of Its Own),” when they heard shouts from the eighth floor just below. They saw smoke outside the windows, and then fire. As David Von Drehle recounts the ensuing catastrophe, in his award-winning book “Triangle,” just a couple minutes later the ninth floor was fully ablaze.

When it was over, 146 people had either died by fire or jumped to their deaths. Most were young women, almost entirely Jewish or Italian immigrants, many still in their teens, one just 14.

That was 100 years ago Friday — March 25, 1911. But the battles that arose in the wake of Triangle over worker safety, worker rights and whether government should regulate business are with us still.

Triangle’s owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, had fiercely opposed the general strike of Lower East Side garment workers two years earlier and had hired thugs to beat up their seamstresses when they picketed the plant. They rebuffed the union’s demand for sprinklers and unlocked stairwells — and when these facts became widely known in the fire’s aftermath, outrage swept the city. Blanck and Harris were tried for manslaughter — but acquitted in the absence of any laws that set workplace safety standards.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-mind-set-that-survived-the-triangle-shirtwaist-fire/2011/03/22/ABh20rEB_story.html


“The best government is the least possible government,” said Laurence McGuire, president of the Real Estate Board. “To my mind, this is all wrong.”

[blindpig]

1. Capitalism hasn't changed one bit. n/t