...What happened at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on March 25, 1911? The fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is one of the deadliest, horrific workplace accidents in the history of New York City. At the end of the half of terror, 146 people were dead. According to the documentary the fire which started on the eighth floor spread to the 9th floor where the Triangle Shirtwaist Workers were getting ready to leave for the day. The workers have no Idea there was a fire raging through the building until it was too late for most of them to evacuate the building. The owners, on the other hand, made it out the building alive through the rooftop. The triangle fire’s tragedy was compounded by the hazardous working environment in the factory and consequently lack of emergency preparedness. According to Berger (2011), Workers unraveled a hose from a stairwell fixture, but no water came out. The building had no sprinklers, nor had the factory ever held fire drills. More disheartening is that the doors in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory only opened inward, therefore when the...
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...It was near closing time in the Asch Building on March 25, 1911 when the flames began. Within 18 minutes 146 people were dead. The fourth largest industrial disaster in United States history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire is remembered today as a tragic incident not only because of all the deaths but because of the fact that they were preventable. The death of 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, would have been preventable if the owners had followed regulatory precautions to ensure that their workers had accessible exit paths and a set plan of action in case of such incidents. From this horrendous inferno arose public outcry for justice and worker safety reform that led to the transformation of the labor code of New York and...
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...second largest workplace disaster in the history of New York City occurred. 146 women and teenage girls died in a fire that broke out on the top three floors of the ten-story work building that the Triangle Shirtwaist Company shared with other businesses. The fire was likely started with a cigarette bud being dropped, and the fire quickly grew with all the clothing and material to burn on. The young women tried to escape without the accommodation of a safe and appropriate exit. There was one flimsy fire exit staircase that quickly buckled under the pressure of dozens and dozens of women trying to run down it and one working elevator out of five that functioned enough to make four trips before the tragedy ended. Women...
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...Triangle Shirtwaist Factory The American labor force was vastly different in the 1900s than it is now. The industrial revolution opened up thousands of jobs in an industry that had never existed before. Due to the infancy of these jobs it was a generally unregulated market by the government. There were essentially no laws protecting laborers at work, no minimum wage, and no child labor laws. Employment at will was the dogma for employee-employer relationships and this inherently favored the employer in all aspects. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was one of the largest garment producers in New York City at the time. The garment industry primarily was made up of women and children. This group had never traditionally worked before because labor male driven. This allowed for employers to take advantage of women and children with maximum hours for minimal wages in unsafe working conditions without any repercussions. Unions were despised by business owners and they would hire scabs to fill in for any workers who went on strike against the company. The police and elected officials were benefactors of the titans of industry so they did not see any need to help the workers in the garment industry until a tragic fire. The specific conditions of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and the equipment contributed to the large loss of life in the fire. There were no laws mandating that the owners provided its employees with fire exits or adequate machinery. First, equipping all...
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...The deadliest workplace accident in New York City's history on March 25th, 1911 was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.(1) Which killed 146 of 500 employees, mostly young female immigrants from Europe working long hours for low wages. The young women died from unsafely inadequate, precautions, and lack of fire escapes. The ten-story building known as Brown Building in which the fire occurred was owned by Max Blanca and Issa Harris. Housing for the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was on the top three floors. Triangle Shirtwaist employees worked hard from 7a.m. until 8p.m. with one thirty minute break for lunch.(2) Subcontractors paid employees extremely low wages which employees would work long hours and many worked six days a week in order...
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...The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 was the deadliest work related accident until the terrorist attacks on 9/11, ninety years later. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a large sweatshop run in New York City. This business was run in the top three floors of a ten story building(Workers in the Industrial Age). This fire on Saturday March 25, 1911 caused 146 people to die from multiple causes such as suffocation, burning alive, and jumping to their deaths. All this destruction still has no definite determined cause but is believed to be caused by a cigarette that got thrown into a wastebasket with highly flammable material. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire contributed to the improvements of today's quality of working places...
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...Triangle Factory Fire safety issues. The triangle factory fire was one of the most tragic events in New York, up until September 11th of 2001. 146 bodies were identified, any others were burnt in the fire or too massacred to tell who it was. No one knows exactly how the fire was started. There are theories, but for it to have gone the way it did, the conditions of the building, and the people, couldn't have been safe. The women who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, had apparently been asking for a wage increase, (then only making 6$ an hour.) and better fire safety. Only their pay was increased, and the hazardous way things worked in the Asch building pursued. Doorways were only able to have one person go down at...
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...Triangle Fire V. Rana Plaza Disaster Unsafe conditions in the garment industry can lead to a catastrophe. In March 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory caught on fire, which lead to the loss of 145 innocent lives. A similar event happened 102 years later. In April 2013 at Dhaka, Bangladesh, Rana Plaza factory building collapsed killing 1100 workers. These two events have similar yet different safety aspects that contribute to the garment industry regulations. The most important similarity between the Triangle and Rana Plaza disasters is that they did not follow safety regulations. In the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, someone dropped a lighted cigarette which caused the fire. The only people that were alerted to evacuate were the factory...
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...political significance than others. For example, the Brown Building housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. In 1911, a brief factory fire would shed light on the cruel working environments endured by workers. The history of the fire and building has a lifetime impact on the workplace and employer standards. The Shirtwaist Factory fire played a significant role as a catalyst for labor reforms. The Triangle Waist Company, founded in the early twentieth century by Isaac Harris and Max...
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...progress for the American economy, unions saw this new business model as problematic for the progress of workers’ rights. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, although a tragedy, was the event that showed the necessity of unions to have direct involvement in legislation and policy. Using the extensive resources on the Triangle Fire from the ILR School Kheel Center as well as additional primary sources from databases and newspaper archives, we were able to analyse the impact of labor unions on the law before and after the fire as well as the actual events of the fire. Additionally we used secondary...
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...The Triangle fire that claimed the lives of 146 people, most of them immigrant women and girls, caused an outcry against unsafe working conditions in factories. Firefighters arrived at the scene, but their ladders could only reach the 6th floor of the 10- storey building. Workers were trapped inside because the owners had locked the fire escape exit doors to prevent theft, so workers jumped to their deaths. The government could’ve prevented the Triangle fire earlier if they listened to the workers’ plea for a safety working environment. Union organization tried to address the employees’ working conditions but wasn’t recognized. The fire was a catalyst for change in New York regarding the role of government in protecting workers because of the...
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...“Triangle Fire of 1911” is a documentary based on the fire that occurred in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on March 25, 1911, in which 145 workers of various ages died. The shirtwaist factory fire was the deadliest workplace accident in history, although shirtwaist factory workers had gone on strike for better working conditions before the fire it was not until after the tragedy that several laws were passed to improve working conditions. “The Triangle Fire of 1911” also talks about how the women that worked in shirtwaist factories had protested before the fire a couple years before for better working conditions. They demanded for better pay and less working hours a day. Harris and Blanck would hire prostitutes and thugs to beat the women...
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...the shirtwaist business. That woman was Clara Lemlich and she was only 23 years old when she initiated the strike. She and her supporters protested for over two months on the streets of New York, until certain textile-manufacturing factories finally agreed to fairer income and decent hours for the employees. However, this wasn’t entirely a success as many companies refused to agree to the terms, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. As a result, a year later, 146 workers employed at the Factory perished in a tragic fire due to a lack of safety preparation, including...
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...often have many warning signs prior to an incident but we choose to ignore them and continue to take chances as was done at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. On March 25, 1911 in New York City 146 people paid with their lives because of the unsafe working conditions that many workers endured during that time. Had just a few precautions been taken before that fateful night it is likely the loss of life would have been greatly reduced. This tragedy helped pave the way for new safety standards including better fire codes and factory safety standards. Industrial growth was proving to be hazardous to people’s health; America was now the world leader in industrial accidents. There was no denying the extremely harsh working conditions were to blame for many of the accidents. The workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the 9th floor were getting ready to go home, standing in single file with open purses so they could be checked to ensure they were not stealing from the company. It was the end of the day and the workers were giddy to be leaving, within moments chaos ensued. Flames had broken out on the 8th floor and as they had in the past workers grabbed pails of water to douse the flames only this time the fire spread quickly, before anyone was aware the 9th floor was engulfed in flames and there was no way out. Doors were locked and fire escapes were non-existent and many of the workers were trapped in a fiery inferno. People were choosing to jump, their clothing...
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...The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, and its effect on labor. In contrast to modern day, Unions during the industrial revolution lived up to the era, and through demonstrations, strikes, and tragedies, were revolutionized. Making the workplace safer, hospitable, and bringing an end to the horrors seen through tragedy and scandal. Upton Sinclair’s tell-all book “The Jungle” brought the inhumane conditions in the meat packing industry, and gave people an inside look into the day-to-day operations of a factory cloaked in scandal, and expelling filth and disease through out the populations. While such tragedies such as the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Fire of 1911, brought to the masses another look into what these extreme conditions can do for production, and its employee’s well being. These factors contributed to reforms in the way America does business. The modern union was born, and in its infancy proposed the basis of the way we work to this day. The industrial revolution brought the United States into a technological and production level that helped to bring the US into the world stage as an economic super power. However, this technology and ramp up in production resulted in poor working conditions, the exploiting of children, meager wages, and a sense that the inhumane was routine and normal. The story of a building thought to be completely and safe with state of the art fireproofing and “their owners put had their trust in that.” ("141 men and," 1911) However at about...
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