New York City’s and, to that point, the nation’s most infamous workplace tragedy occurred this week (March 25) in 1911 when a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York’s garment district. The fire killed 146 workers, mostly dirt-poor immigrant women who worked 12-hour days for $15 a week. The factory was your typical sweatshop, and the factory’s owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were unscrupulous crooks who had a history of deliberately burning down buildings to collect on their hefty fire-insurance policies.
The March 25 fire wasn’t deliberate, but Blanck and Harris had done next to nothing to ensure the building’s safety. The fire started in a rag bin on the factory’s 8th floor, but the hose used to extinguish the fire had rotted and its valve rusted shut, so the fire — and panic — quickly spread as workers stampeded to the four elevators. Unfortunately, only one was fully operational, and could carry only 12 people at a time. And it broke down after four trips.
Other workers rushed to the two stairways leading to exit doors on the ground floor, both of which were locked, causing a back-up in which the people seeking to escape were trapped on the stairways. As for the rickety fire escape, it soon collapsed under the weight of the panicking workers, killing at least 20 people.
Most of the 146 deaths, however, resulted from people trapped on the stairways being burned alive or asphyxiated by smoke, plus those who jumped out of windows to their deaths. The safety nets the firefighters used to catch the jumpers were inadequate to the number of people jumping — often in pairs — and they ripped apart.
Two who did escape were Blanck and Harris, who were on the building’s top floor and climbed to the roof, where they jumped to an adjoining building. They were subsequently tried for first- and second-degree manslaughter, but their expensive lawyers managed to impugn the credibility of the witnesses, and since no one could prove that Blanck and Harris had known the exit doors were locked, both men were acquitted.
Still, they did lose a civil suit in which the plaintiffs won $75 in compensation for each victim. Then again, their fire-insurance compensation amounted to approximately $400 per victim, for a tidy profit of $325 for every death they caused.
In the wake of this massacre, New York passed a number of worker-protection and fire-safety laws designed to improve worker safety and toughen penalties for fire-code and other workplace violations.
With mixed results. Two years later, Max Blanck was again arrested for locking a door in another factory he owned during working hours. He was fined $20.
