Case study: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

By the early twentieth century, ready-made clothing factories produced garments faster than ever. In the United States, more than 450 factories employed 40,000 garment workers to sew shirtwaist blouses, a style of woman's shirt.

The public was accustomed to buying cheap clothing, yet all too often vulnerable workers suffered in dangerous and unsafe working environments.

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire occurred in 1911 in a New York garment factory producing shirtwaists. A fire broke out and 146 garment workers died – most of them immigrant women. One of the reasons so many people died was due to unsafe working conditions as exits were blocked or locked, meaning people were unable to escape the flames. The fire remains known as the deadliest industrial disaster in New York City history.

This was an eyewitness account:

" A puff of smoke... caught my eye... I learned a new sound - a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk. Thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead, sixty-two thud-deads... The height was eighty feet... The floods of water from the fireman's hose that ran in the gutter were actually stained red with blood... I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer"

(Stein, Out of the Sweatshop, 188).

The video below describes further the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster and its impact on labour rights in the United States.

Today, unsafe building and fire standards, locked exits and overcrowded factories are still the same issues we are seeing in textile and garment production – particularly in developing countries - over a century later. The next section discusses how through globalisation, these issues have become more prevalent.