The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and You

[gwydion]

Long time readers will know I have a thing about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. PBS ran an excellent documentary on it this week. I wept for the long dead women trapped in flames and falling from the sky, as I always do really.

I also kept thinking that this is the America the republicans are trying to drag us back to. After all they are campaigning on abolishing Unions, the EPA, Health and Safety standards, the minimum wage, child labor laws, and public education. I think of those long dead martyrs who struck for better conditions and died horribly because they failed so that the owners wouldn't hav to share their milion dollar a year income or treat them decently like humans and not cogs.

It horrifies me that we've learned nothing, that we're told repeating these tragedies is better than a living wage and safe conditions, that a fourteen hour day for two dollars a day is so much better than what have now. I hate this nostalgia that has no understanding of just how terrible things were in those "good old days." For women, for children, for POC, for LGBT folk, for anyone not lucky enough to be born rich.

The men who fled cowardly over the roofs without unlocking the exit doors or even warning the women and children they left to die got a nice juicy insurance settlement and were acquitted of any wrong doing. After all, how can they know the door was locked even though they ordered it to be that way during working hours and made sure it was done?

Comments

[big-wired.livejournal.com]

It's been bad up here too, from what I see here in Canada. The premiere of BC was really business friendly and did lots to help businesses at the expense of workers. He was hounding the teachers for them to do more with less, and his cohorts in the Liberal Party are still doing the same.

Then there's the stuff I saw and heard of in Alberta, where they would bring in immigrant workers as leverage against the unions and then get those same workers to work as fast as they could without the proper safety checks and balances. It lead once to the deaths of 16 Chinese immigrant workers when an oil tank they were working on collapsed because no one was checking their work, only glad that they were working so fast. And Alberta has an increased in tradespeople death every year.

Then of course, there's the idea of safety being held over our heads, where if something does go wrong and we report it, we're written up for it and punished.

[deepseasiren.livejournal.com]

I especially love it when people tell me how angry 'illegal immigration makes them' and they don't stop to think just how many items are made in dangerous sweatshops or BY illegal immigrants for a dollar a day, THIS is what keeps the items so cheap for consumers to buy!