By Kevin Baker
At first, passers-by thought they were seeing bundles of cloth being tossed into the street. It took them a few minutes to realize they were seeing women, their voluminous skirts billowing out as they leaped from eighth- and ninth-story windows, desperately trying to escape the fire behind them.
Within 18 minutes, 146 people, most of them young women and girls, lay dead or dying on the paving stones of Greene Street and Washington Place in Greenwich Village. It was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, one of the deadliest disasters in the history of the American workplace.
Thursday’s commemoration of the 1911 fire was its second milestone of sorts in recent weeks. On Feb. 21, Bessie Cohen, nee Gabrilowich, the next-to-last survivor of the fire, passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 107.
She was a sturdy, independent woman who survived a mugging at age 89 and lived on her own until she was 93. Yet for years after the tragedy she buried her head in her arms and sobbed whenever there was a thunder or lightning storm.
Her reaction was understandable. The fire unfolded like a bad dream. The hoses inside the building didn’t work, and the stairwell doors were locked. The fire department came, but its ladders were only six stories high, and the factory was on the eighth through 10th floors.
The building that housed the factory was actually fireproof. Nearly everything inside it was flammable, though. The stair doors had been locked because the factory owners feared their employees would steal bits of leftover cloth.
The fire rallied support for better, safer working conditions, and it reinvigorated the union movement. Every March 25 since, the garment unions have honored the Triangle dead and the living with a rally on Washington Place.
For many years, leading politicians would attend, and the survivors would sit on the dais — aging women, most of them Jewish or Italian, dressed in black. At the site, bolted to what is now called the Brown Building, is a plaque proclaiming that the sacrifice of the dead made American working conditions the finest in the world.
That’s a questionable assumption today. The improvements that have been made in wages and working conditions tempt us to think of the Triangle fire as something out of the distant past.
In fact, the state Labor Department has estimated that there are 2,500 illegal sweatshops operating within New York City alone. Only 37 percent of the shops employing New York’s 90,000 garment workers meet Federal requirements on wages and hours, a Federal Labor Department official told me, and the rate of compliance is comparably poor in other major cities. The modern sweatshops are filled with new immigrants, some of them children, working for sub-minimum wages under conditions that invite another catastrophe.
To combat these abuses, New York State’s Apparel Industry Task Force has a staff of only 35. The United States Labor Department has only 950 investigators monitoring some 6.5 million work sites, and a budget of only $120 million to police wage violations — about $1 per worker.
Yet both state and Federal officials point out that bigger budgets and more inspectors will do only so much. Sweatshop owners have become adept at simply closing their doors and moving across town or across the country. There, they can easily set up shop again under the name of a partner or relative — and with a new supply of easily exploitable immigrant labor.
As a result, labor regulators have focused their recent efforts on exposing illegally made goods — that is, getting consumers to recognize and refuse to buy them. Just how viable a strategy that is in an economy where goods come to market from all over the world, under all sorts of labels, is anybody’s guess.
Yet anyone who thinks we should just throw up our hands should have been at Thursday’s Triangle fire commemoration. Only the faces have changed. The older Jewish and Italian women are gone now, but Washington Place is filled with a whole new generation of Asian and Hispanic Americans, still trying to build a better life.