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Triangle Shirtwaist Fire And Its Relevance 105 Years Later

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105 Year Later, We Will Not Forget!
(l-r Arieh Lebowitz, Associate Director, and Brittney Willis, Intern. Photograph by Avia Moore.)

March 23, 2016: New York, NY – One hundred and five years ago, March 25th, 1911, was a tragic day in New York City. 146 women and girls, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants, perished from a fire that spread on the floor where they worked making shirtwaists, ladies’ blouses. On the 8th, 9th, and 10th floor of a building between Washington Place and Greene Street, just east of Washington Square Park, these poor souls could not escape the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory workplace: the locks on the door that were originally placed to protect minor property loss lead to a horrific loss of lives. Not long after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the United Hebrew Trades of New York, the Ladies Waist and Dressmakers Union Local 25 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the ILGWU as a whole and others held a funeral procession (see above) to mourn the loss of the garment workers’ lives.

105 years later, the United Hebrew Trades, now the New York Division of the Jewish Labor Committee, still commemorates not only the loss of workers’ lives on the job, but the need to protect the safety of workers, and their right to join a union. On March 23rd, 2016 the Jewish Labor Committee joined with others to again commemorate the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (picture below). The deaths of these garment workers were not totally in vain: as a result of this tragedy, more than 36 laws were passed for improved fire and safety laws, as well as child labor laws.

We cannot afford to forget this tragedy. It helped secure many of the labor rights that we have in the United States today. The deaths of 146 women and girls were not necessary for the fight better working conditions. But this tragedy exposed many of the ills industrial greed causes. Over 100 years later, there is still much work to be done to combat poor factory conditions across the globe. Factory fires, unsafe working conditions, excessively long work days, poverty-level wages, exploitation of children as workers still plague countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, Mexico, Russia, Philippines (and elsewhere). There are still sweatshops, factories, fields and several other places with labor violations in the U.S. in 2016!

Until the day that corporate and industrial greed no longer causes the suffering of factory workers, we will continue to commemorate the 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire who paid the ultimate price.

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