The Triangle Fire

On a Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory’s top floors. Many of the workers there were women, most of whom were very young, some as young as 15. They were for the most part recent Italian and European Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States with their families to seek a better life. Instead, they faced lives of poverty and horrible working conditions. The Triangle Factory was a non-union shop although some of its workers had joined the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

One of the reasons this fire was so tragic was that the factory owners kept the doors locked so the workers couldn’t steal fabrics. So when the fire broke out, not all of the workers were able to escape. Instead they began to climb out of the windows, hanging on to the sides of the building waiting for the fire department to arrive. When the fire began to intensify, they started to leap from the windows down to the pavement seeking a quicker death instead of being burned alive in the flames. One hundred and forty-six of the five hundred employees working there died.

The Triangle Fire is still remembered today by many people because it gave progressive organizations the chance to rise up and do something about the working conditions that a lot of people had to face everyday. Eventually their plan worked and the laws were changed making it so companies “Had” to improve working conditions. Twenty-three individual civil suits were brought against the owners of the Asch building. On March 11, 1913, three years after the fire, the owners of the building settled. They paid $75 per life lost.

Believe it or not sweetshops still exist today despite all the efforts to stop it…

Craig Jacobsen

July 2006