Summary Of Conditions At The Triangle Shirtwaist Company

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was one such typical sweat shop. The owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, typically employed young Jewish immigrant girls who had come to the United States with their families in search of a better life for them and their loved ones. Instead, they encountered lives of relentless poverty and dismaying working conditions. Being immigrants who struggled with a new language and culture, the factory owners took advantage and made the working poor their ready

The company owners did not care for their employees at all. In the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, many young women and girls were forced to work six days a week with very little pay. According to source five of the research packet, the “girls worked in tight spaces with sewing machines close together” (What Went Wrong?). So close, that a person could barely get up and move around. Around this time, none of the girls in the factory have ever done a fire drill.

Frances Perkins, a survivor from the Shirtwaist Factory Fire quotes “Moved by this sense of stricken guilt, we banded ourselves together to find a way by law to prevent this kind of disaster.” Frances Perkins became secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and this quote said by Perkins “something must be done. We’ve got to turn this into some kind of victory, some kind of constructive action,” helped new workplace safety standards into law in the state of New York. The benefits that I would like the audience to see is how workplace safety is important by learning about the history of regulation, OSHA, and workers compensation.

“When the fire began to rush on our floor we wanted to jump out of the window at first but somehow I kept my head while the others were fighting in the dark from the smoke. I kept saying to myself what all the greenhorns used to say, that in America they don't allow one to burn.” Rose Indursky was one of 275 women who worked in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory that went up in flames on March 25th, 1911. One hundred and forty-six people died. The majority of deaths were on the ninth floor.

Sweatshirts from Sweatshops In this essay there are many of the universal intellectual standards are violated. Initially, as an audience I assume that the speaker is talking about the poor working condition of labor workers in the factory and trying to make an impact on audience to help the situation for positive change.

Industrialization had swept America off its feet as big industries took over the entire country in not just an economical perspective, but in social and political environments as well. As leadership was lacking on a political level and technology and inventions began to expand, the business industry boomed as more and more citizens moved away from urban areas into industrialized cites to provide for their families. Corporations such as the railroad industry had participated in the growth of capitalism, as they became the central hub for commerce, labor, and transportation. But, since big industries started to take over so much of the economy in such little time, corruption became a problem as business owners took advantage of their authority

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was a linen sweatshop that caught on fire, due to fire and chemicals that were being used to produce their product. Significantly, the workers were all immigrant women that were being taken advantage of because these women were desperate to work, they did not know what was fair treatment; women were not expected to work due to men being the dominate gender. When the sweatshop caught on fire, some women felt the need to jump out of a nine-story building because of the apparent danger. The doors were locked, the stairs on the side of the building fell apart and couldn’t hold the women, and the fire that was caused due to no safety regulations killed most of the women which emphasized the push for more labor

“It was back breaking, it was finger-numbing. It was particularly rage-inducing not because it was painfully hard work, but because children hunched over hour after hour, squinted at the threads, cleaned one collar after another, one cuff after another, one arm piece after another until the piles were depleted,” (“My Life as a Sweatshop Worker”). These are the words of Raveena Aulakh, a Toronto Star reporter who worked undercover at a Dhaka, Bangladesh garment factory. The extreme environment illustrated in the reporter’s account develops an image that is known as a sweatshop, which is commonly defined as a shop where workers are employed to manually produce goods at extremely low wages for long hours under substandard conditions.

Karen Cortez Professor Bell HIST 1302-81420 September 24, 2017 Written Exercise 2 The progressives were a group of well-educated people who were concerned about the poor working environments of others and wanted to protect consumers and other problems that existed in the 1900’s. In 1911, workers had died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, some jumped to their deaths while others were burned. Work safety was an important issue for the progressives. Progressives wanted to end corruption and make the government more attentive to the people’s needs.

Due to the bad working conditions there was laws passed such as child labor law, workmen's comp law and minimum wage law. The Progressive Era

These laws were a significant departure from the earlier idea that the government should not intervene in the economy and showed that Progressives believed in using government power to control business practices and, most importantly, protect its employees. The Triangle Fire documentary puts the spotlight on the change brought by the Progressive movement. The documentary shows the horrific conditions faced by workers in 1911, which led to the death of 146 workers, and the poor response of the factory owners and government officials. This tragedy served as a humongous catalyst for the Progressive movement, which pushed for laws and regulations that would protect workers and prevent similar tragedies from happening

On a warm day in New York City in 1911, tragedy struck. It was an incident that would be written up in newspapers across the country; a horrendous incident that would change legislature, labor laws and hundreds of lives forever. This dreadful event left nearly 150 girls and women dead, and became one of the most murderous fires in the history of New York City. The day was March 26, 1911, and the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was an historic one.

In a capitalist environment, at least where corporations have been concerned, the government should neither intervene or regulate the open market. In fact, the essence of the capitalist economic system is to create an environment where the free market would be able to dictate itself. Regardless of the system’s original intentions, there have been cases globally and throughout time where government intervention has been necessary — cases where the general public itself has been affected negatively by corporate abuse of the market. For instance, the United States’ public-corporate relationship throughout the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Throughout this period, which was known as the Progressive Era, industrial America

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire led to imperative reforms that sought for adequate conditions for workers and the advent of the Progressive Era. (Source 2). The United States was in the middle of the Second Industrial Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century. Many of the rural population migrated into cities for jobs, while immigrants from Europe also added to the growth of the cities.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory had no clearly marked exit signs and only one functional elevator reached by a narrow corridor. There were two stairways in the factory, however one was locked due to theft and the other had a door that only opened inward. The factory did have one fire escape, but it was very narrow and would of taken hours for all of the workers to get to safety. This fire causes the public to become aware of the conditions of sweatshops. Sprinkler systems and installing sufficient fire escapes those are properly marked with exit signs were implemented in new factories for the safety of the workers.