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Not to forget: The Triangle Factory Fire

A tragic event, is commemorated every year on International Women's Day, I am talking of the fire at the Triangle Factory in New York, 1911.Ecco the dramatic story from Wikipedia:

The Triangle factory fire, which occurred in New York March 25, 1911 , was the worst industrial accident in the history of New York. Caused the death of 146 persons, mostly young workers of Italian origin and Eastern Europe. The event had a strong economic and social policy, following which they were enacted new laws on occupational safety and significantly grew the membership of the International Ladies 'Garment Workers' Union, one of the most important unions in the United States.
The Fire of New York an event commemorated by the International Women's Day but this is not, as erroneously reported by some sources, originally the Women's Day.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company
blouses produced the fashion of the time, the so-called Shirtwaist.
owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, occupied the three upper floors of the building 10-story Asch building in New York City, the intersection of Greene Street and Washington Place, just east of Washington Square.
The company employed about 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women from Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe. Some women had 12 or 13 years and rotated every 14 hours for a week work that ranged from 60 hours to 72 hours. Pauline Newman, a factory worker, says that the average wage for workers ranged from 6 to $ 7 a week. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company
had already become famous outside the textile industry before 1911: the massive strike of textile workers began November 22, 1908, known as a protest of 20,000, began as a spontaneous protest at the Triangle Company.
The International Ladies 'Garment Workers' Union negotiated a collective bargaining agreement that covered almost all workers after a strike in four months, but the Triangle Shirtwaist refused to sign the agreement.
The conditions of the factory were typical of the time. Fabrics Flammable were stored throughout the factory, scraps of fabric around the floor, the men who worked as cutters sometimes smoked, illumination was provided by open gas lights and there were a few buckets of water to extinguish fires.
the afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire that began on the eighth floor of the Shirtwaist Company killed 146 workers of both sexes. The majority of them were young women, Italian or Eastern European Jews. Since the factory occupied the top three floors of a ten-storey building, 62 of the victims died in a desperate attempt to save themselves jumping from the windows of the building as there is no other way out.
Factory owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, who at the time of the fire were on the tenth floor and kept locked for fear that the workers would steal or did too many breaks, unless you put in and let women die. The process that followed them acquitted and the insurance paid them $ 445 for each worker who died: the compensation to the families was $ 75.

Thousands of people attended the funeral of the workers.

This article is published under the GNU Free Documentation License . It uses material from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Photo credit wallyg loaded photos on Flickr License: Creative Commons