The Triangle Fire

The Triangle Fire
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The Triangle Fire
At 4:45 P.M on Saturday, March 25, 1911, Annah Oullo, the floor leader at Triangle Waist Company of New York City rang the closing bell and shut off the power to the drive shafts. All the machines fell silent and every one was up and running hurrying to pick the week's wages and head home. Just as the closing bell rang, there was fire scare and everyone was into it, trying all means to prevent the fire from spreading and other scrambling over the elevator for safety. It happened so fast that nobody could have pointed out the real cause of the fire. One hundred and forty six people, many of whom were women died in the Triangle fire (Feature Essay). The Triangle Waist Company made “shirtwaists” or rather women blouses which had become very popular as a result of the drastic change in women's fashion in the 1890s and early 1900s. The drastic fashion change reflected women desires for freedom in many dimensions of their lives. The company produced two thousand blouses a day employing more than 500 people, most of them immigrants from Eastern Europe. Triangle, just like other companies by then did not offer favorable wages but was highly preferred as it provided jobs throughout the year (Feature Essay). Two years before the tragic fire, workers from the Triangle Waist Company had joined in an industrial strike that was declared in the Cooper Union Meeting of 1909, “I have never declared a strike in all my life. I have done my share to prevent strikes, but there comes a time when not to strike is but to rivet the chains of slavery upon our wrists” said Gompers, the president of AFL (Union). One journalist termed the strike as the largest ever to have been organized by working women anywhere in the globe, “the largest strike ever organized by working women anywhere in the world”, the journalist noted (Feature Essay). The striking women from Triangle were fighting for adequate fire exits and unblocked exits during working hours. Unfortunately none of their grievance was granted and the consequences of their cries were spread out in the historic tragedy, “I remembered their great strike…, in which these girls demanded more sanitary workrooms and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies told the result”, one reporter wrote after the tragedy (Feature Essay). In 1909, Samuel Gompers, the then president of AFL, while addressing a crowd of garment makers urged them to use strike as a means to air their grievances to employers if it became necessary. In a statement directed to s...