WUNRN
USA - HISTORICAL FACTORY FIRE LED TO
WOMEN WORKERS' UNION FOR SAFETY, BENEFITS, RIGHTS
INTERNATIONAL LADIES
GARMENT WORKERS UNION
TRIANGLE
SHIRTWAIST FACTORY FIRE IN 1911 - WOMEN WORKERS PERISHED
The
union also became more involved in electoral politics, in part as a result of
the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
on March 25, 1911, in which one hundred and forty-six shirtwaist makers (most
of them young immigrant women) either died in the fire that broke out on the
eighth floor of the factory, or jumped to their deaths. Many of these workers
were unable to escape because the doors on their floors had been locked to
prevent them from stealing or taking unauthorized breaks. More than 100,000
people participated in the funeral march for the victims.
The fire had differing effects on the community. For some it radicalized them still further; as Rose Schneiderman said in her speech at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911 to an audience largely made up of the well-heeled members of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL):
I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came
here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and
we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews
and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are
today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered
and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the
firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.
This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in
the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister
workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so
cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters
little if 146 of us are burned to death.
We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you
have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way
of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they
know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the
law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.
Public officials have only words of warning to us – warning
that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of
all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise,
into the conditions that make life unbearable.
I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too
much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working
people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong
working-class movement.
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The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union was once one of the largest labor unions in the United States, one of the first U.S. unions to have a primarily female membership, and a key player in the labor history of the 1920s and 1930s. The union, generally referred to as the "ILGWU" or the "ILG," merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in 1995 to form the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). UNITE merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) in 2004 to create a new union known as UNITE HERE. The two unions that formed UNITE in 1995 represented only 250,000 workers between them, down from the ILGWU's peak membership of 450,000 in 1969.