The Fire Rises...

• Publication year: 2018
• Author: JUSTIN SONNICKSEN, ESQ.

The Fire Rises...

JUSTIN SONNICKSEN, ESQ.

Pleasant Hill, California

It is human nature to take for granted the privileges we have in life. The sacrifices and obstacles prior generations endured are easily forgotten during the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives. Occasionally it is important to put things in perspective and try to understand how past events impact our present reality. This perspective is especially important when analyzing issues pertaining to workers' rights, to ensure that we as a society learn from the mistakes in our history.

An Industrial Disaster

In the late afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire started in a fabric scrap bin at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Approximately 30 minutes later, 146 employees of the company had died as a result of what became an inferno. The factory was located on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the building it occupied in the lower Manhattan section of New York City. Many of the employees died as a result of jumping out of the building to avoid being burned to death. The vast majority of the victims were female; the youngest worker to perish was only 14 years old.

The conditions the factory workers faced prior to the fire would be considered deplorable by today's standards, although in 1911 the garment workers at Triangle were fortunate enough to work in a factory with windows, restrooms, and electric-powered sewing machines. The employees worked 52 hours a week and were paid between 14 cents and 23 cents an hour (adjusted for inflation, approximately $3.20 to $5.50 an hour). During work hours one of the exits on the main factory floor remained locked, so all the employees were steered to leave out of only one exit. This arrangement allowed the factory floor manager to inspect the employees' purses at the end of a shift to ensure they were not stealing scraps of cloth for personal use.

We often complain of having to "put out fires" at work. The employees of Triangle occasionally had to extinguish actual fires in the factory. The owners of the company, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, had previously collected on insurance policies from fires that occurred at their factory prior to 1911. They responded to these prior fires not by implementing safety measures such as sprinkler systems but, rather, to purchase large insurance policies.

When the scrap bin fire began, the factory manager elected to try to put it out himself instead of alerting the fire department. Unfortunately, the cotton-fabric...