TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FIRE & MOURNING FOR THE DEAD AND FIGHTING LIKE HELL FOR THE LIVING by Kurt Young

I have written on our Facebook page before about this tragedy, but it’s worth revisiting here.  Why?  Well it helped drive many of the workplace safety innovations and systems we have today.  So I talk about it quite a bit.  Also, many people have never heard of it.  

On March 25, 1911, in Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, many women, and several women were working in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.  Today we would call it a sweatshop.  Most of the workers were recent Jewish and Italian immigrants, some a young as 14.  The conditions were as bad as you would imagine.  

At 4;40 PM, there was a fire.  Unfortunately there was no thoughts of how to get people out of such workshops, in fact often the doors were chained shut.  The first itself spread rapidly.  Some died from the fire, some from smoke inhalation, some accidentally fell trying to get out of the way, some jumped rather than be burned to death.  When all was said and done 146 workers, 123 woman and 23 men were dead and another 71 were injured.  

It was a huge tragedy that made a nationwide splash.  And thanks to that, several good things did happen.  The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union which had already formed, grew dramatically.  It has merged with other unions and it became UNITE HERE. Also, the momentum to create OSHA was born from this tragedy.  

But most relevant to us was what it did to the possible formation of a new way to take care of injured workers and employers.  In Ohio the debate about whether to create a workers’ compensation system was well under way.  But this pretty much sealed the deal.  It was only a matters of months before our system was born, as people discovered just how horrible protections for workers who were injured or died were.  

In the early 20th Century, the US economy had become one where factories and workshops were rapidly replacing farms as the way that most people earned a living. But this wasn’t without costs.  There were few, if any laws designed to protect workers safety or give them much recourse if they were injured on the job. 

Under the old system, a worker would have to sue their employer, prove the employer was solely responsible, and then get a settlement or a judgement.  If no one was at fault, or a co-worker without any means, or a the worker themselves made a mistake, then there was no recovery.  Labor unions and other workers’ advocates fought hard for workplace safety laws and safety nets to protect workers, but like now, Government was more concerned with businesses being profitable than about workers.  I have seen that creep back in my three decades fighting for workers.  

This tragedy was on  March 25, 191, just under three months later, the Workers’ Compensation Act in Ohio was passed and became law, on June 11, 2011. The original law was voluntary.  A year later, the State of Ohio held a constitutional convention and the workers’ compensation system became a part of that.  Ensuring that both employers and workers would get protections from the compromise that is workers’ compensation.  

Sadly, over the last thirty years especially, with one party rule in Ohio, for a party who once again is about corporate profits above all else, many protections for workers have been chipped away by amendment after amendment and court decision after court decision.  But still, even in this weakened state, it’s far better than the system from before that date. 

So today, as a firm that fights for working families, we at the Law Offices of Kurt M. Young, LLC, celebrate the start of our great compromise, and the power it gave it’s advocates in 1911.  It’s taken far too many hits over the three decades Kurt has worked in this system, but thanks to the hard work of labor, workers’ advocates and attorneys like Kurt, it’s still there today.  

Still, to use of our favorite quotes from Mother Jones, repeated every year at Workers Memorial Day services throughout Ohio and the United States, we “mourn the dead, and fight like hell for the living”.  Then again, that’s what we have done every day for our 20 years as a firm and Kurt’s 30 as an attorney.