Republish this articleThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site.Out of ashes, victory: How New York’s garment workers rebirthed the US labor movement by Mel Buer, The Real News Network March 26, 2025 Out of ashes, victory: How New York’s garment workers rebirthed the US labor movement by Mel Buer, The Real News Network March 26, 2025 https://open.spotify.com/episode/11r5MDcli8VduMw4JiFTpq?si=7897ca8ea5fd484f As we’ve mentioned many times before on the show, movements today are a part of a legacy of extraordinary actions taken by ordinary people. Tapping into our own labor history provides us with a blueprint for action in today’s turbulent world. On March 25th, 1911, a fire began in the scrap bins under a cutter’s table on the 8th floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Within minutes, the entire floor was engulfed in flames, spreading to the ninth floor and 10th floors–where 200+ workers were just finishing up to go home for the night. By the time workers were alerted to the conflagration, options for escaping the fire were few. By the time the fire was brought under control, 146 workers were dead. New York City saw sweeping reforms in the aftermath of the fire, catapulting some pro-reform lobbyists like Francis Perkins all the way to the highest halls of government with the introduction of the New Deal 20 years later. Near the 114th anniversary of this tragedy, Mel sat down with labor historian Dr. Erik Loomis, professor at the University of Rhode Island and author of his forthcoming book, Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice to talk about the struggle for better working conditions in the garment industry in New York City, the fire itself and the reforms enacted afterwards, and why it’s important to learn from our own labor history in this current moment. Additional links/info: Cornell University - ILR School: Remembering the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire Dr. Erik Loomis on Bluesky More information about Dr. Loomis’s forthcoming book, Organizing America Permanent links below… Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show! Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page Featured Music… Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song Studio Production: Mel BuerPost-Production: Jules Taylor The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Mel Buer and I've been your host for the month of March. Next week, max will be back at the helm for the month of April, bringing you more stories from the working class today for the last episode of this month, we're taking a moment to train an eye on the past. As I've mentioned many times before, movements today are part of a legacy of extraordinary actions taken by ordinary people. Tapping into our own labor history provides us with a blueprint for action in today's turbulent world. With that in mind, we're talking about the triangle shirt, waist Factory fire. Today on March 25th, 1911, a fire began in the scrap bins under a cutter's table on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory in New York City. Within minutes, the entire floor was engulfed in flames spreading to the ninth and 10th floors where 200 plus workers were just finishing up to go home for the night. By the time workers were alerted to the conflagration options for escaping the fire were few, by the time the fire was brought under control, 146 workers were dead. New York City saw sweeping reforms in the aftermath of the fire, even catapulting some pro reform lobbyists like Francis Perkins all the way to the highest halls of government. With the introduction of the New Deal, 20 years later near the a hundred and 14th anniversary of this tragedy, I'm sitting down with labor historian Dr. Erik Loomis, professor at the University of Rhode Island, an author of his forthcoming book, organizing America Stories of Americans who Fought for Justice to talk about the struggle for better working conditions in the garment industry in New York City, the fire itself and the reforms enacted afterwards, and why it's important to learn from our own labor history in this current moment. Thanks for coming on the show, Dr. Loomis. I really appreciate you taking some time this morning to talk about a very important piece of our labor history. Erik Loomis: Thanks for having me. I'm very happy to be here. To start off this conversation, I just want to give our listeners a little bit of a chance to get to know you and who you are. So who are you, where do you teach? What kind of work do you do? Erik Loomis: Sure. So my name is Erik Loomis. I am a history professor at the University of Rhode Island. I focus on labor history. I'm also environmental history, so I teach a lot of courses at my university. I kind of cover a lot of ground in US history that people don't necessarily otherwise would be able to take. So I try to offer things that students need or want, but I make sure I teach a lot of labor history. I'm teaching labor history right now and super awesome, a great group of students, and so that's been a lot of fun. And then I write about these issues in any number of different ways. Everything from I write at the liberal blog, lawyers, guns of Money, a lot of that's about labor history. I have this day labor history series that I started there that I also syndicate do threads on Blue Sky to give a lesson almost every day. Not quite every day, but almost every day I have a lesson about labor history that's out there. So yeah, so I do what I can to publicize our labor history basically. Yeah, I think that's actually a good place to start with our conversation. One thing that I like to do when I am hosting this podcast is sort of pull back the curtain on what it means to organize within the labor movement and to kind of give folks a sense of the nuts and bolts of what that looks like, but also to really help our listeners tap into the legacy of organizing in the United States, which is long storied, often violent, and really important to ground ourselves in this space. So to start this conversation, let's just talk about what it means to learn about our own labor and movement history. And as a historian, why is it important to pay attention to and learn about this? Erik Loomis: Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about that and this book have coming out in the fall or I guess late summer Organizing America kind of gets into this a lot because I am very interested in sort of like what do we do with our past? Every American, everybody probably in the world tell stories about the past for themselves, and those stories often reflect what they need in the present. So why do we could tell all of these different stories about all of these different moments in time, and that includes in our labor history. So triangle is a horrible fire, one of the worst things that have ever happened. Of course, we're going to get into this, but it's far from the only mass death incident in American labor history. Why do we tell that story? So I'm really interested in why do we tell these stories that we tell and what do they do for us? And for me anyway as a labor historian, and I think different historians would have different answers for this question. I don't represent the historical community on this. For me, there's a combination of things. Some of it's inspiration, and I think that would be something a lot of people would say, right? We could be inspired by these movements in the past. And I agree with that. But I also think, and maybe we'll get into this as we talk about triangle, that sometimes when we tell stories that are strictly inspirational, we actually lose something that I have this idea of our movement history and the way we teach it is a Mount Rushmore sort of thing, which in my world is not a compliment. It's like I know how I have a great idea how to represent the past. Let's blow some faces into a mountain in South Dakota. What a great idea. And everybody could come gaze, and I'm like, oh, it George Washington. Oh, he's so wonderful. But we kind of do that with our movement history. We sort of gaze up as Malcolm and King and Chavez and Rosa and Debs, and we kind of look up. It was like, wow, if only we could have those leaders today. And I would try to counter that a little bit because if you get into the details of what they were doing, they didn't really know what they were doing at the time either. And I think in some ways learning our labor history is really useful to sort of ground ourselves not only in what they achieved, but the fact that we're not really that different than them. We can be them. We can become that person. And I think that's a really important piece of it that I really try to emphasize is the humanity, the mistakes and the realization that there's not that big of a difference between our struggles and the struggles that they had. And we'll talk about this a little bit later in the conversation, but I read David Re's Triangle in preparation of this episode and beyond the book, the book itself is kind of a monumental achievement in really kind of laying out the conditions leading up to the fire, the minute by minute details of the fire, which are harrowing and horrifying, and the reform movement that was born out of the fire plus the manslaughter trial. And we'll talk all about this here in a moment, but the thing that strikes me the most about reading these books, and this is something that I come across often when I read labor history, is that good historians, good journalists through their archive work, resurrect these people in a way that makes them far more real than just a photo on a labor website or a story about these monumental achievements. As you say, these are human beings who could have at another time been my neighbor or I could have been sitting next to them at a factory table, and their lives are full of the same sort of quiet dignity and indignities that we suffer and enjoy as working class people today. So I feel my background is in, I have a master's degree and in literature, I did a lot of work within archives for my own work research when I was in grad school. And I'm always struck by the ability to take what is just a little short newspaper clipping or a receipt or some sort of bit of detritus that makes its way forward into our current moment and to really kind of build life from it and depth from it and memory and to sort of share in that humanity. And so I agree, I think that especially with labor history, not only does it provide the playbook for how to potentially tackle some of these similar problems that we are experiencing with Triangle and with the shirt, waist Factory workers strike that happened a year prior to the fire, they're going up against the same sort of political machine that we have now. They're going up against the same sort of exploitation and indignities that workers are experiencing now. And you can learn a lot from the ways in which they organized and often their failures to be able to have a sense of what you can do in this moment. Erik Loomis: Yeah, and I think it's also worth noting, while you don't want to overdraw the lessons from the past, I mean the past and the present are not exactly the same thing, but within, we live just thinking here of American labor history, we live in a society that is shaped by a series of political and economic constructs, and by looking at our labor history, we can also get a sense of in our present debates around anything from the relationship of labor unions to democratic party or issues of democratic unionism or strikes or whatever it may be, a really deep dive examination into our labor history can really do a lot to suggest the potentials or limits of various contemporary issues that we're talking about. Again, not that the past necessarily is a restriction on what's possible in the present, but the basic structure of our economy and government has not changed a lot over the centuries. And even with Trumpism, I mean, everything that's happening right now is basically a return to the conditions of the Triangle fire that we're talking about. And some of those strategies used back then may become more valuable again with the destruction of labor law and the other horrible things that are happening right now. So I think that those deeper dives into our labor history, real discussions of our labor history as opposed to just snippets, but really help us move conversations at the contemporary labor and movement building world forward in some very concrete and useful ways. Right. Well, I think that's a good segue into getting into the meat of the discussion today, which is to talk about the triangle shirt, waste Factory Fire, which happened on March 25th, 1911. First, I kind of want to put it in a bit of wider context about what was going on in New York City at the time. So in the early 20th century, garment production was the largest manufacturing business in America. In the decades leading up to the early 20th century, there was this popularization of standardized off the rack fashion during the Industrial Revolution. It meant that instead of making clothing at home or via various sort of cottage industries, the Industrial Revolution standardized that entire process and turned it into the ability to walk into a clothing store like Nordstrom's or something and to pull a sized garment off the rack. And prior to more mechanized processes that didn't require as many hands in the process, these garment production factories were staffed by hundreds and thousands of workers. And the largest piece of that was in New York City, in the east end of the city. So just to give our readers, our listeners a sense here, what do these conditions look like for workers at the time who worked in specifically the garment industry in New York? Erik Loomis: Sure. Yeah, it's rough work. You had a mostly immigrant workforce, particularly Jewish immigrants, some Italians as well. And that was working in clothing was something that quite a few of these immigrants had brought over from particularly Russia where there had been a lot of tailors and cutters and things like this. They enter into a growing American garment workforce that you accurately described, and that is happening at a moment in the late 19th and into the early 20th century. We're beginning to see a shift so that a lot of the early sweatshop industry in New York was home-based. Basically, this contractor would move things out through these subcontracting systems and put things in people's homes. And so you think about a tiny little New York apartment on say the Lower East side where a lot of this was taking place and people might complain today of their studio apartment, how small it's, but there could be 10 to 15 people living in that at the time. And then during the day, they're working in it right there. They're basically moving, what they have is for furniture to the side and putting the sewing machines in there. By the 1905 or so, that's beginning to shift pretty heavily to what we would think of more of as a modern sweatshop, that it becomes more efficient for contractors to have the work in a particular place such as the location of the factory that would become notable for the triangle fire. And that was a very exploitative workforce. They hired mostly women thinking that they could control 'em. Work weeks could be 65 to 75 hours a week, but also tremendously unstable. And so you'd be working those 65, 75 hours a week if there was work, but then if the orders dried up, you went to nothing. So rather than have a consistent 40 hour week or even more than that, but consistent, it was either all the time or nothing at all. The women worked basically between three to $10 a week for all of these hours, which was poverty wages, even at that higher level. And factory owners really tried to control workers' movements. Locking doors was super common. Fear of these workers stealing cloth and things like that would lead to searches requesting permission to use very unsanitary and disgusting bathrooms, fines all the time at work being required, supply your own supplies such as needles and things like this. Sexual harassment of these workers was a real problem. It's a rough way to work, And I kind of want to draw a parallel. It's not a one-to-one, but I do want to draw a parallel from these sort of sweat up conditions that lead into this sort of wider factories that come through in the mid 19 aughts to sort of gig work that we see in some industries today where it is truly a race to the bottom in terms of payment wages and conditions and in these sort of sweatshop conditions. Absolutely. You would find that these contractors were a dime a dozen, and if you were the type of person who wanted to ask more for more wages for what you were working, they could throw you out and find someone within 15 minutes by walking to a market down the street. We see these conditions a lot in the sort of gig economy, certainly in some of the white collar industries like writing or things of that nature where people are making pennies on the dollar for some of the work that they do. And you can sort of see those parallels. And it didn't just because these factories then establish themselves within a garment district and start employing 500 to a thousand workers per factory or what have you, doesn't necessarily mean that those conditions improved much. Erik Loomis: Oh, absolutely not. I mean, in many cases they became worse. I mean, homework is not a great thing by any stretch of the imagination, but you had a certain control over your, no one's sexually harassing you, no one's locking the door, no one's saying you can't go to the bathroom. So conditions were probably even worse. I mean, the whole point of centralizing it is of course to maximize profit and you are continuing to maximize profit by exploiting this very frankly, easily exploited workforce for the reason that you discuss in that you have masses and masses of people coming to the United States at this time. And there was a lot of people desperate for work. I think I read a statistic that was like Ellis Island was processing upwards of like 5,000 people a week at the height of peak of that piece of immigration. So you can imagine streams of individuals coming in after spending a week in the bow of a ship, making it through the sort of gauntlet that is Ellis Island and then ending up in the streets of New York and wanting to engage in some sort of employment that they can have skills for. Erik Loomis: And a lot of times part of the reason they're willing to accept these horrible wages other than not having a whole lot of other options is that the first thing they're trying to do is get their families over. And so the more people that are working even in exploitative conditions, the more money they can save to get the cousins over or get, A lot of times a father would go first, save money, get their family over, and then they'd kind of collectively get that extended family over. And given that these were Jewish immigrants in Russia at this time, a lot of that is desperately escaping the state sponsored antisemitism that's going on at that time. So there was very real reasons for these workers to sacrifice a lot, even knowing that they're working in a terrible job because they had higher calling at that point. Right. Well, and this kind of brings us to a remarkable sort of labor action that happened in 1909. So we have at this point 20 to 40,000 garment workers in New York City who are working in various factories, the triangle fame factory, I think they had what four other locations that were making various items. They're called shirt waste. They're, or essentially blouses varying sort of degrees of fashion with lace and other things. But there were also factories all over the lower East side and the east side of New York that were doing some of the same stuff. And in 1909, in response to worsening conditions, there was a massive strike in the garment district that lasted close to a year, I believe, that was led primarily by women over 20,000 garment workers took to the streets and they walked out of dozens of factories in the garment district on strike. And something that kind of gets missed a little bit in history, maybe this is just me loving a good name for it, but they called it the uprising of the 20,000 and it was considered an opening salvo and a new struggle for better working conditions in the industrialized sort of industries in New York City. So maybe we can kind of start with the strike itself and really kind of underscore how revolutionary it was to see a militant fighting union of primarily women leading this particular labor action and sort of how those impacts reverberated into the following years and decades. Erik Loomis: The union they had that was in that industry, it was called the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, or the ILG as it's commonly known. But ironically, the leadership of the union was basically all men and men had taken over that union, and a lot of these men were skilled cutters and things like this. And even despite the name, they weren't really that comfortable with masses of women in the workforce. I mean, they brought over gender ideologies as well. And so in New York, you have in those weeks and months leading up to this strike, which begins in November of 1909, you have young organizers, again, mostly Jewish women, some of whom who will become pretty famous in the future, Clara Lemick, Roche Schneiderman, Pauly Newman, all of which will become pretty famous names in American labor and reform history are organizing and the factories to say, we don't have to live this way. It's not necessary that our conditions are so exploitative. Some of them came from families who had brought radical politics with them, which was a growing thing in the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe at the time through the Jewish fund. Others did not. Lelet came from quite politically conservative families who were outraged that their daughter was engaging in such radical activities. But it all begins to come to a head that fall. And there's a big meeting in New York, I think a Cooper Union. And the point of the meeting in part is for labor leaders to try to cut the strike off. So the ILG member, the president's there and other leading figures are there, American Federation of Labor Head, Samuel GOPer shows up and basically urges caution. And you have these, you can almost imagine it, it's like two hours of these guys getting up and talking and going on and on and trying to kill time and trying to really undermine what they saw as a rebellion of low skilled workers that they feared would undermine the very limited gains that they had made in other parts of the garment industry. And finally, after listening to this Lemick, who is this very small woman, the very tiny young woman gets up and basically marches up to the stage. And in Yiddish says, and I'm going to quote what she says here, I am a working girl, one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers. You talk in general terms, what we are here to decide is whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now. And she simply overwhelmed all those men on the stage. The workers walked out the day Right standing ovation for that, the whole place just, and they had overflow for that as well. It was a very, very large meeting of workers, I think. And Clara Lemick specifically is unique in that she is probably in my reading over the last couple of years of labor history, a really solid example of what happens when you can successfully salt workplaces. She would hop from factory to factory, get hired on and salt the crap out of the workplace, organize those workers and bring them out on strike. And inevitably for some reason, she would either leave the job or get fired from the job and she would move on to the next one. And her organizing was so dangerous to the factory owners that they actually had her followed and she got the crap beaten out of her in the street and the next day and for the following weeks, you could see her on street corners displaying the bruises on her face. And using that as a rhetorical sort of example to say, we're onto something, join us. And I dunno, as a woman in the labor movement, I find those examples to be really meaningful to anyone who's listening to these sort of stories is that you may not even know who Clara Le is, but she is truly a revolutionary spirit in the labor movement. Erik Loomis: And I think that learning about people like that, I think there's this whole, people like to say history repeats itself, which it doesn't. Don't ever say that to a historian, but there is these lessons out there. There are these people out there that you can be like, wow, they really did this amazing work and they suffered for it. I mean, getting the shit beat out of you is not a great story. That sucks. And she will be during the strike itself, lime Lake is beaten by a cop and suffer six broken ribs. She's arrested 17 times during the strike. So it's not, and these stories from the past, it's not great. But I think that in a moment in which I think you see a lot of activism out there, or the beginnings of whatever we're trying to do to stop Trump and all this horrible stuff. And there seems to me to be a lot of, I want something to happen, but I don't actually want anything to happen to me. I'm scared of something happening to me. And the reality is things are probably going to be happening to us. And learning that you can take that and build from it, I think is a critically important thing. It is a little bit of a side note, but I was just, yesterday in my labor history class, we were reading oral history from Harry Bridges, the great organizer of the longshoreman. And my students were struck because he talks in this oral history. He's like, yeah, every day the cops would beat the shit out of us, and then the next day we would just come back and keep doing the same thing. And it blew their mind that you could do that. And I think these are the things that are important to understand, to bring from that past to the present. Lelet can be very inspiring this way. So what was the outcome of the strike? So they were on strike for quite some time. A lot of these young women were arrested, sent to the workhouse for a brief period of time. You had some really interesting cross class solidarity and fundraising. Even JP Morgan's own daughter was fundraising for the strike at one point. Funnily enough, they kind of moved away from support of the strike after some pretty hefty socialism and socialist rhetoric entered the sort of demand structure of the strike. But what was the outcome? What happened to these workers? Erik Loomis: Yeah, I mean, the answer is in a sense, it is both a win and a lush. I mean, the cross class stuff is fascinating. These wealthy women come out, some of which would be big players in the future. I mean Francis Perkins, we'll get into later is one of them, right? And this is a moment, this progressive era is a moment in which middle and upper class, particularly younger people are looking at society and they're saying the things our fathers created in this era of uncontrolled capitalism, they're just way out of control. And maybe these workers have a point. So there'd be these tentative alliances, which as you described, it's one of the things that happen. What will happen to the strike itself is that by and large, the owners very much including the men who would own the triangle fire, were definitely there to resist as much as they could. And after about 11 weeks, workers begin to, they start trickling back. I mean, because the international, the ILG, they still didn't really support the strike, and they didn't have the ability to have a big strike fund or anything like that anyway, so they don't win a union shop. They don't win a lot of workplace safety gains. But the manufacturers do agree to some real concessions. The work week drops to 52 hours in most of these factories that were four paid holidays a year. You don't have to buy your own work materials anymore. And there's kind of a vague agreement to negotiate pay rates, which is not really followed that much in the aftermath, but there were real material wins. What there was not were material wins about the conditions of work, which will be a huge problem going forward for the union, though that ILG local, local 25 really expands to become a big power player in New York for the next several years. And so the workers themselves feel very empowered by what happened to them. It's a victory, Right? And many of these workers who picketed outside the Triangle Factory are some of the ones who walked into work on March 25th, the 1911 and did not come out. And now on to sort of the hard conversation here. So this is a year after the strike workers have gone back to work. March 25th, 1911 workers walk into the ASH building, the Lower East Side. They took the elevators up to the upper floors to the triangle shirt, waist factory, which occupies the eighth, ninth, and 10th floors of the Ash building, which is now owned by cuny, right? It's a science building, university science building. Erik Loomis: I think it's N-Y-U-N-Y-U, Erik Loomis: Yeah. So as I said earlier, I read Triangle, which is a very good book that kind of digs into the conditions of the garment workers, and it gives a minute by minute accounting of the triangle fire itself. I'd never really taken the time to learn the details of the fire. I found that there's those sections of the book to be frankly harrowing, openly crying while reading it. It is, I don't want to get into really the hardcore details of it because it is really upsetting and maybe for a lot of folks, but suffice to say, so the conditions in these couple of floors, eight and nine are floors where the factory work is being done. The 10th floor is kind of where the owners sit. They have a showroom. There is some tables for packaging and shipping the items that are put together, but the vast majority of materials are being worked on on those two lower floors. So the fire begins right around the time of the closing bell. Folks were getting up to leave right around what 5:00 PM And something to note about these particular setups is that the cutters who are the ones who do the sort of precision cutting of the materials that are then sewn together in a sort of assembly line style at various parts in the factory are dropping scraps of highly flammable cotton materials into a bin underneath their cutting tables. And we learn later during the manslaughter trial that those bins are only emptied like four times a year. And so you can imagine that what's underneath these tables is tons and tons of extremely flammable cotton and lace materials that just pile up. And obviously there's a no smoking sign in every floor because this is a highly flammable workplace environment. Some of these cutters still smoked at the tables. And on the evening of March 25th, we're not quite sure exactly what got thrown into the bucket, but it was probably a still lit match or a cigarette butt or a cigar butt that gets thrown into one of the buckets under the table and it lights a fire within what, I think it's like less than 10 minutes. That entire floor is on fire. Erik Loomis: Yeah, I mean, so it starts on the eighth floor And everybody on the eighth floor gets out. They call up to the 10th floor as you point out that the office or the owners are, and those guys are all able to get out. You have those close New York buildings and you can kind of hot from building to building in that area, but in the panic sort of people forgot to call the ninth floor. And within just a few minutes, you have this raging fire on the eighth floor smoke coming up to the ninth, and the doors are locked to get out and there's an elevator and some workers do get out via the elevator. About a hundred are able to get out in those few minutes before the elevator becomes non-functional. But then you have 146 workers still stuck up there and there's nothing that they can do. They try to open the door, they're looking for the key, nobody can find it, and they end up facing a choice of burning the death or jumping from the ninth floor, And then they all die. So you have 146 dead workers. This was not particularly uncommon. I mean the numbers were high, but you had more workers than that die in coal mines pretty frequently. And you also had other garment fires that were hardly uncommon. There had just been one the year before in Newark, across the bay from New York, but no one sees that. The thing about these sweatshops is that it's a very low capital industry. All you really need is some sewing machines and a few other things. So you can set these up anywhere. So as you pointed out, it's an afternoon. It is a nice day. We're in March right now, and there's been a couple of nice days, and everyone including myself is like, oh my God, I'm so happy to be outside. It's sunny, including I look outside the day. It's a beautiful day here in Rhode Island. And so that's how people were, right? And so it's late afternoon. People are strolling around. It's the lower East side, but it's kind of on the border of more prosperous areas. So people are just walking around and all of a sudden plumes of smoke will rise up and all these people head over to see what's up and what's up is a mass death incident. And what made this different was honestly for our American history is not the numbers, it's the fact that this became a public event. People saw this, people saw the people making their clothes die, and that makes an enormous difference in the response of a nation that had traditionally been quite indifferent to workplace death. And there were a number of things that might have made this less of a mass casualty sort of incident. The owners of the Triangle Factory could have at any time updated their factories with fire suppression systems. This was not something that was particularly new. Fire safe factories had been a thing for a number of decades prior to this horrible tragedy. There is an interesting note in Von Dre's book that suggests that perhaps the two owners were setting fire to their previous, trying to essentially commit insurance fraud in order to get rid of some of their previous stock in previous years. There's no indication that this was anything other than accident. I want to make that clear. But the way that the building was designed was not designed very well for escape. There were no fire drills that were happening with any sort of regularity that would've made it easier for workers to have a direction to go. And yes, there is. There were two exits, two doors. One door was kept locked in order to reduce the amount of stealing that was happening. Whether that's true or not, doesn't really matter. Folks had to go through essentially a carousel at the other door in order to get their things searched before they could leave, which obviously is leading to serious bottlenecking in times of panic. And even the fire escape didn't really have, it wasn't really a fire escape. It wasn't quite rated for the amount of people to run down the steps, and it did not lead to anywhere. There was no clear egress to the street at the bottom of the fire escape. And unfortunately, it was just a rickety thing and it collapsed. And 35 people died plunging to their desks because the fire escape collapsed. So we have all of these things, these things that contributed to a really horrendous workplace accident. And you're right, tens of thousands of folks were on the streets watching on buildings nearby. There's dozens and dozens of sort of accounts of the fire. And even Francis Perkins, who figures a little bit later was standing on the street watching this happen, and they're watching workers hold each other outside of the windows of the ninth floor and drop their friends onto the concrete, and they're seeing others who are flying out of the windows on fire. This is a really horrendous thing for a lot of people to witness. And to your point, there is a testament to how affecting it was for folks to witness this and hear about this happening in the days after the event when they lined the victims up for identification at the pier, sort of a coroner's warehouse. There were tens of thousands of people there who were thousands of people who just wanted to walk through and potentially pay their respects, but also family members who were trying to find their loved ones. And even in the days afterward during these funeral processions, you have folks standing out for hours in the rain watching these funeral processions as folks are identified and then taken to various cemeteries around the city. So we can kind of start there in terms of just beyond the real sort of impact of this and how this moved into answering the question, what are we going to do about this in the years leading after the tragedy? Erik Loomis: Yeah. Well, it's a mixed bag. I mean, first as you point out, the owners blanket Harris were incredibly negligent. They had been really the most anti-union of all of the major garment worker owners or garment factory owners in the uprising. They really don't get any serious legal punishment for it. In fact, they just, what? They kind of disappeared from the record, but we know that they at least attempt to open up another factory. They don't even seem to care after all these workers die. They're really indifferent. But part of the legacy of Triangle, we're moving in that direction. And it is interesting because it kind of shifts from a worker story to a middle class performer story Because Perkins is there and she's already involved in some of these issues, but she gets really motivated to become a much more active labor reformer, and of course later will become the first female cabinet member Secretary of Labor under FDR for his 12 years. And really a truly remarkable human being. But the changes that come are not really about workplace activism. What happens is that Perkins, Robert Wagner, who's a rising politician in the New York legislature who will later be the sponsor of the National Labor Relations Act, that creates the system of labor negotiation that we sort of still have today, although it's probably disappearing soon, thanks to our lovely Supreme Court. But the union election process is something that kind of has some things that come out of this. But in the immediate aftermath, there's serious investigations that happen. And what it leads to are important things around fire safety, building safety, things like this. So the New York Fire Department could only really handle fires up to the seventh floor of a building. This starts on the eighth floor. There's changes around that. There's changes around the kinds of conditions that are allowed in a workplace around issues of flammability, for instance. And these are truly important advances. And New York becomes a leader in creating a safer workplace. But the flip side of that is that at almost the very same time that's happening, the textile industry begins to leave places like New York, and so they don't have to deal with Claral LEC anymore. They begin to move to North Carolina, to Alabama, to Tennessee. And you have a whole nother generation of, because again, I mean part of the reason that people like Blank and Harris don't hardly care where you had other industries that are taking these issues more seriously is that the capital investment needed to open a sweatshop is so they're not protecting a serious level of investment. And so you could recreate these factories in east Tennessee and Western North Carolina and avoid immigrants, avoid socialists, avoid any union traditions. And so by the twenties and thirties, that's all shifted down there and you have a new generation of labor organizing that takes place down there, new generations of violence in a industry that proves quite resistant to changing its fundamental ways that it operates, including to the present. Right. So I mean, what's the sort of antidote to that? I mean, I know that particularly with Francis Perkins and the sort of committees that were born out of the Triangle Fire, they didn't just stop with garment factories is my understanding. They spent a lot of time, energy, and they had the political will because Tammany's political machine sort of backed this as they're moving into the mid-teens to really sort of begin to look at places like candy factories and bakeries and the various sort of industrial places that are also in need of reform. And so we see this sort of new decade or so of real, the political will is there essentially to support these sort of this reform movement that then brings us into what ultimately becomes FDRs new deal and things of that nature. But I guess my question is if the political will didn't exist, if Tammany wasn't willing to back these sort of plays because they are sort of seeing the writing on the wall, they're seeing that there is enormous among voters, enormous need and want for increased oversight things, more progressive working conditions, things of that nature, would we have the same sort of, I guess you could call them policy wins within the labor movement? Erik Loomis: Probably not. I mean, I think the political atmosphere is very, very important. And I think that we sometimes ignore that in our contemporary conversations too, our peril. It really is a matter of kind of a combination of worker activism and a particular moment in time in which the politics are ready to act, in which people who have more access to power are willing to do what workers want them to do, either because they support it genuinely or they're afraid of the worker power. And this really leads into the New Deal. I mean, these things, the rise of Perkins and the creation of National Labor Relations Act and all of this is a part of two decades, really 25 years by that point, consistent working class struggle to try to pressure the political world to create these changes. Tammany needed to do it because Tammany was relying on working class voters as its core. They had a heavy, they were very heavily involved in the immigrant communities and providing services and things like that. And if those people weren't going to come out and vote for Tammany politicians, then Tammany was potentially going to lose out. It was in their interest to see this through. New York had a far from universal, but it had a lot of capital, progressive politicians like these middle class people who saw needs for legitimate reform. And that begins to, of course, then influence the Democratic Party. The Republican party remains tremendously hostile to almost all of this and create, thanks to the Great Depression and other conditions, the ability of this to go relatively national in 1930s, the rise of Perkins, the rise of Wagner, the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, all of that stuff is super critical. So yes, I mean the political side of it is real. And this is the thing is you see other worker struggles. It's not like when these factories say textiles move to Tennessee and North Carolina that all workers acquiesce to this system, they struggle too. But the problem there is that the governors are just willing to call the National Guard to shoot them, and there's not the political will there. And that is still a problem that we see in when we're talking even before we get into issues of globalization, which if we're talking about this industry, we have to talk about the reality is that the United States, even today, the politics of New York or the politics of Tennessee, let's just say they're a little different, and workers have a lot more power in a place like New York City in part because politicians will listen to them. We're in Tennessee where I used to live as well and was working in labor issues. They don't care what you have to say. How do you get folks to have such, to have a heel turn on that? How do you start to begin to pull those threats in service of the labor movement? What are some ways in your experience that workers can kind of with a clear eye see as a sort of pathway towards really engendering more political will for better worker legislation? Erik Loomis: Honestly, I think a lot of it has to, I think there needs to be a lot more internal political organizing within unions. I think this is a serious problem in the contemporary framework is that a lot of unions are not really doing a lot of political education in their rank and file. And we see this in the kinds of the ways in which Trump has made inroads in the working class and things like this. At the time back then you had the level of political education. If you read union newsletters just as an example, they're engaging. It could be even relatively conservative unions like say the Carpenter's Union. They're engaging in very significant political education, like helping workers understand their position in society, helping them figure out how they're going, what their proper action is. As a carpenter or as a wobbly or as a member of a communist union later, it really goes across the political spectrum. What is your role as a worker in this society? And that was in states where those conditions kind of lent themselves to that could lead to serious political action supporting candidates. And that's going to become really crucial. So if we're thinking if we move forward to the thirties and we think about the Flint Sitdown strike, a big reason why the Flint Sitdown Strike Succeeds is that the governor of Michigan, Frank Murphy, has been elected by workers and had pledged as part of his platform to never use the national guard against workers. So workers had elected this person who then does what he says he's going to do, will not forcibly evict these sit down strikers from that GM plant in Flynn and in GM at that point has no other options. They were relying on state power to crush those workers, which had been the standard way of the past. And so that stuff can make just an enormous serious difference. But in some ways, it has to start with unions doing the work themselves to be like, we are going to engage in a serious political education aspect for our members. And that does not just mean showing up two weeks before the election and telling you who to vote for, but actually building worker power by getting an everyday person who's a busy person, who's got kids and soccer practice or wants to hang out at the bar or whatever they want to do to get them to take that time that they don't really have and to understand their position in society. And I think that's really critical. I think as we kind of round out this conversation, I think also are living in a time where there's like what 9% union density we are and have been for quite some time sort of fighting this rear guard battle against the interests of capital and the exploitation of the workforce. And rightfully, I think a lot of unions have spent a lot of their time and energy and money on trying to continue to bring in new organizing is a way to stop the slow bleed that is union organizing in this country. The problem is it feels like this needs to be, this is becoming or has always been a sort of multi-front fight struggle here. And in the last couple of years, especially as I've been working as a labor reporter, I've been feeling pretty heartened by the amount of new independent organizing that has been happening. And I really hope that it'll continue and there's ways in which we can kind of maybe begin to become more militant in a new generation and to allow these more militant, younger folks to really kind of push forward policy and education that they're bringing into as the sort of shot in the arm to the labor movement. But yeah, we have an uphill battle quite a bit. Erik Loomis: Well, I think it's worth noting Claire Lemick had an uphill battle too, right? I mean, what you're describing is a lot of what Lemick and Newman and Schneiderman and these other leaders were facing, right? A union leadership that was pretty fat and happy with what they had. They were really nervous about young people coming and taking over the movement and they didn't really support them when they did, and it just didn't matter, right? Lemlich did it anyway, and she spent the rest of her life as this incredible organizer doing all sorts of things, ending her life, actually helping the nursing home workers out in California where she was by the time she was an older woman, helping them organize into their own union and forcing the nursing home to honor the United Farm workers. Great boycott. So she continued organizing forever, but never really, actually never with the support of the international lady garment workers union leadership, I mean, she had to fight for a pension from them in the fifties and they were like, oh no, it's that woman again. I think it's important to understand for younger organizers that the idea that the power structure, even within the labor movement's just going to roll over for you. They're not going to do that. You just do it anyway. They just create a scenario where they don't actually matter anymore. And I think that's important. And we've seen that to some extent. I mean, some of the things that say that the Starbucks workers have done, for example, which is regenerated a lot of energy, but at the same time, because of these larger political conditions, has not led to a growth in the actual overall labor movement, which is part of our story too. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Eric. We're going to have to end it here. Please come back on anytime to talk about your forthcoming book, come back anytime to talk about history. I mean, I'll be doing some history episodes when I come back here to host in May and hoping to do one on the Memorial Day massacre here in Chicago and hopefully something about Mayday. So if you'd like to come back on and chat about that, I'd love to have you. Erik Loomis: I'm always happy to chat about labor history, so anytime you want. Great. Thank you so much. Erik Loomis: Hey, thank you. That's it for us here at Working People. We'll see you back here next week for another episode, and if you can't wait that long, then go explore all the great work we're doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I'm Mel Buer and thanks so much for sticking around. We'll see you next time. This article first appeared on The Real News Network and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.