1911: the triangle factory fire: one hundred years ago, a deadly blaze in New York helped spur reform of the nation's labor laws.

• Author: Berger, Joseph
• Position: TIMES PAST

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It was one of the deadliest workplace disasters in American history, killing 146 people, most of them young immigrant women and children, in a New York City clothing factory.

The victims of the fire at the Triangle Waist Company died in agony. More than 50 had no alternative but to jump from a ninth-floor window as an afternoon crowd of onlookers gasped below. Others burned to death or suffocated behind locked exit doors. Still others plunged to the ground when a flimsy fire escape collapsed.

The horror made the nation more conscious than ever that girls as young as 14 were working for meager wages and that many workplaces lacked even common-sense safety measures, like sufficient exits and sprinkler systems. The fire also led to numerous local and state labor reforms that served as a model for the nation and invigorated the national movement for workers' rights.

"It was an incredibly galvanizing event for the nation's labor movement and the rights of workers" says Bruce Raynor, president of Workers United, which represents garment workers today. "After Triangle, people were so shocked, not only by the terrible disaster, but by the drama of these young immigrant women who were treated as less than human by their boss."

Between 1860 and 1900, 14 million immigrants poured into the U.S. searching for jobs. They (and many American-born workers) worked in grimy, treacherous factories as manufacturers rushed to turn out products faster and more cheaply. Injury and death were common. Just four months before the Triangle fire, a garment factory blaze in Newark, New Jersey, killed 25 women.

Teenage Immigrant Workers

"By one estimate, one hundred or more Americans died on the job every day in the booming industrial years around 1911" writes David von Drehle in his book, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. "Mines collapsed on them, ships sank under them, pots of molten steel spilled over their heads, locomotives smashed into them, exposed machinery grabbed them by the arm or leg or hair and pulled them in."

But earlier calamities were dwarfed by what happened in March 1911 at the Triangle Waist Company, located on the top three floors of a 10-story building in downtown Manhattan now owned by New York University. Triangle was one of the nation's largest manufacturers of shirtwaists, known today as blouses. More than 500 workers cut fabric for, sewed, and boxed 2,000 shirtwaists per day. Retailing for about $3 each, shirtwaists were all the rage because they freed women from uncomfortable corsets.

Most Triangle workers were between 16 and 23, with some as young as 14. They were immigrants or children of immigrants from the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe or the peasant villages of southern Italy. Many barely spoke English.

Becky Reivers was an 18-year-old orphan just off the boat from Russia and working for $7 per week, the equivalent of about $160 today. Esther Harris, 21, earned $22 a week as a skilled sample maker, but that had to support her father, mother, and sister. Rosie Freedman, 18, had survived a pogrom--an anti-Jewish riot--in Poland and was living with her uncle, sending money to her family back home. Typically, these women lived in tenements with windowless rooms and shared bathrooms.

Two years before the fire, Triangle workers--many of whom worked 12 hours a day, six days a week--had gone on strike against the Triangle factory and its owners, asking for a 52-hour workweek. Some of their demands were met (see timeline).

On Saturday, March 25, 1911, a little before 5 p.m., workers were getting...