This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, a deadly sweatshop fire that killed almost 150 people. US Labor Secretary Hilda Solis wrote a column in the Washington Post that puts contemporary challenges facing working people into a historical context:
Today, workers and their allies are being met with that same kind of opposition. In states nationwide, working people are protesting the actions to strip them of collective bargaining. The Triangle fire and the Upper Big Branch explosion a century later make clear to me that workers want and need that voice — about wages and benefits, yes, but about more, too. Collective bargaining still means a seat at the table to discuss issues such as working conditions, workplace safety and workplace innovation, empowering individuals to do the best job they can. And it means dignity and a chance for Americans to earn a better life, whether they work in sewing factories or mines, build tall buildings or care for our neighbors, teach our children, or run into burning buildings when others run out of them.
I’ll be thinking about all of this as I make my way to New York on Friday for the 100th anniversary of the Triangle factory tragedy. The building is still there; it now houses offices for New York University. Thousands are expected to mark the occasion with a march, speeches, the reading of the victims’ names and the laying of flowers in their honor at the site by schoolchildren. It will be a powerful reminder of what we’ve lived through, and what we still have to do.
History is an extraordinary thing. You can choose to learn from it, or you can choose to repeat it.
For me, the choice is clear, as it was for Frances Perkins. We must always be a nation that catches workers before they fall.
Will North Carolina be a state that catches farmworkers before they fall? Over the last decade, we have seen workers die in the fields from heat stroke. We've seen mothers exposed to so many toxic pesticides that their children were born with severe birth defects.
Farmworkers do some of the hardest, most dangerous work in the country for poverty wages. They labor in relative obscurity, isolated from society and often taken for granted. Join the Harvest of Dignity Campaign to help ensure that something like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, or deaths in the fields, won't happen again.