evolutia stelara: ARE LABOR UNIONS NECESSARY?

Procession in memory of victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire

In this day and age, are Labor Unions relevant?

Twice in my life I belonged to a Labor Union; first one was when I was a singer in my late teens I belonged to AFTRA and then I had to take off a year between high school and college to save enough money to pay for tuition and worked in an assembly line putting together dishwashing machines…then I had to join The Machinist Union.

As I was a very right-wing conservative in those days (hard to believe) I was even working in the Goldwater campaign and as is expected, Republicans were demonizing labor unions then as they are now. I really disliked labor unions and I didn’t understand their history nor did I stop to think what was the reason for their existence, how they came into being.

After that period of darkness in my life and total disregard for social consciousness, I went off to college and learned a little bit about history. The thing that still haunts my thoughts is the ” Triangle Shirtwaist fire” where 146 garment workers either burned to death or jumped 10 stories to their deaths…all because the owners of the factory had locked the exit doors to keep the sweatshop conditions and prevent anyone from bailing out.

Those were the days when it was a true paradise for the super wealthy and the corporations…they had their government working for them and the politicians in their pockets. Even judges and law enforcement were the instruments of repression at their disposal.

The long history of struggles coming from workers to obtain even meager gains in America is legendary. It wasn’t just that fire that caused public opinion to shift in favor of organized labor; it was a series of events that made it clear that America had become a country of only “THE HAVES AND THE HAVE NOTS”

When I look at the concerted efforts from Republicans to eradicate labor unions, when I see how politics is dominated and influenced by the lobbyists of special interest groups…when I see the obscene amounts of money spent by these special interest groups to lie and mislead Americans so they vote Republican…I draw a very conclusive parallel between the situation at the beginning of the last century and that of today. Undoubtedly the Republicans would like to return to that period of time when money was king and the people little more than slaves.

There is no doubt in my mind that Republicans want to turn back the clock…not to the 1950’s where the WASPHROMS had a lofty life but instead, the Republicans would like to go all the way back to 1910 where moneyed folks and companies did whatever they wanted without government interference.

It is not surprising that the attacks that were begun by the DEAR LEADER REAGAN have continued and increased to the point that the Republicans are now on their last set of initiatives to decimate the labor unions…and it had to be applied in Wisconsin where a lot of these labor movements got their start.

It is also very clear to me now that the FREE ENTERPRISE system is the best economic model but it has to have regulations or it doesn’t work for everyone…why? because then greed overwhelms everything and we all know that greed has no conscience. The rich and the corporations when left to their own devices will seldom do “the right thing”. Invariably the rich will hoard their money and the corporations will try to exact more productivity from their workforce for less money…because the bottom line is what matters…not society, not the country, not humanity

Laura Clawson gives us a very accurate account and a historical perspective of that infamous fire in this Sunday, March 20 article; one hundred years later:

Triangle: Remembering the Fire

If you're like me, you learned about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in high school history, but what you learned was fairly sketchy—the opening paragraph of its Wikipedia entry probably about captures it:

The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent immigrant Jewish women, age 16-23. Many of the workers could not escape the burning building because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits. People jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers.

As you might guess, that leaves out rather a lot.

This is the week of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle fire, and tomorrow (Monday) night at 9:00, HBO is airing a new documentary. Triangle: Remembering the Fire is relatively brief, but it adds a great deal to the sketch, on several levels.

The documentary first places the Triangle fire in context: Less than two years earlier, garment workers had gone on strike in the Uprising of 20,000, making outrageous demands like a 52-hour work week and overtime pay.

Meanwhile, the fiercely anti-union owners of the Triangle factory met with owners of the 20 largest factories to form a manufacturing association. Many of the strike leaders worked there, and the Triangle owners wanted to make sure other factory owners were committed to doing whatever it took—from using physical force (by hiring thugs to beat up strikers) to political pressure (which got the police on their side)—to not back down.

Soon after, police officers began arresting strikers, and judges fined them and sentenced some to labor camps. One judge, while sentencing a picketer for “incitement,” explained, “You are striking against God and Nature, whose law is that man shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. You are on strike against God!”

The Triangle company held out, the workers went back, and the safety concerns they raised went unaddressed. That New York's garment workers had been fighting for better treatment, and that many of the fire's deaths might have been prevented had they succeeded, is a central part of the context Triangle: Remembering the Fire provides.

That context of struggle is crucial to understanding the fire's aftermath, in which New York instituted a range of workplace protections. Frances Perkins would later famously call March 25, 1911 "the day the New Deal began."

We don't, in other words, have fire alarms and sprinklers and adequate exits and other workplace protections because big employers want us to have them. We don't have them solely because of tragedy. We have them because workers have joined together and fought for them. In 1911, workers' struggle was the context that made the Triangle fire something other than a meaningless accident, that showed a way to prevent similar tragedies.

Triangle: Remembering the Fire does something else as well. It vividly, forcefully puts the humanity of the Triangle workers in front of us. Much of it is told by descendants of the fire's victims and survivors, and augmented by photos of the victims. It takes hold of you, all their beautiful serious faces—teenagers working 60 or 70 hour weeks, recent immigrants struggling to get ahead. And after the fire, their families were left struggling to identify them from the smallest remnants, seemingly inconsequential possessions that survived.

The care this documentary shows for the workers of the Triangle company is exquisite, so much so that finally the list of the fire's victims is complete. Michael Hirsch, one of its writers and co-producers and a longtime member of the Daily Kos community, searched out the final six names:

No New York City agencies and no newspapers at the time produced a complete list of the dead, Mr. Hirsch said. The most thorough list — 140 names — was compiled by Mr. Von Drehle when he wrote his book, and that was largely based on names plucked from accounts in four contemporary newspapers.

The obscurity of their names is evidence of the times, when lives were lived quietly and people were forced by economic and familial circumstances to swiftly move on from tragedies — with no Facebook or reality television cameras to record their every step and thought.

Mr. Hirsch, 50, an amateur genealogist and historian who was hired as a co-producer of the coming HBO documentary “Triangle: Remembering the Fire,” undertook an exhaustive search lasting more than four years. He returned to the microfilms of mainstream daily newspapers overlooked by researchers before him and to ethnic publications that he asked to have translated, like the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward and Il Giornale Italiano. He estimates that he consulted 32 different newspapers.

(He also appeared on CBS News Sunday today.)

Triangle: Remembering the Fire is an indispensable memorial to the 146 working men and women who died horrible deaths on March 25, 1911, doing justice to both the story of lives lost and families grieving and to the story of struggle for workers' rights and the importance of government regulations.

Those two sides of the story would often be called the human side and the political side, but this documentary ultimately reveals the inadequacy of that binary opposition. The Uprising of 20,000 is a human and a political story, with women risking their livelihoods and freedom for better working conditions. The long hours and brutal working conditions garment workers faced—including the fire that killed 146 of them—are a human and a political story. "Government regulations" and "workplace safety laws" sound like dry terms, but this is what they're about: nothing less than people's lives. And that is something to remember when you hear the likes of Scott Walker and John Kasich arguing that employers oughtn't be bound by those pesky government regulations.