Morgan Episode 55 triangle

The hosts of the podcast Ill-Equipped History discuss the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in this episode. They talk about the importance of learning from history and the ongoing efforts to dismantle unions and workplace regulations. The hosts also mention a school assignment they had to do in middle school where they had to write a letter from the perspective of a survivor of the fire. They provide some background on the garment industry in New York City during the early 20th century and the working conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. They mention the lack of regulations and safety policies, the long hours and low pay, and the locked exit doors. The episode ends with a discussion about a strike that took place in 1909, where garment workers demanded better pay and working conditions. weird cord okay welcome to it oh it's okay what were you saying I feel like the sharp a thing like this yeah okay welcome to ill-equipped history where two best friends tell you a story from history and why are we doing this again Emily because we can I'm Morgan your host for today how are you doing Emily yes she is you'll still find a way right well so y'all know by the title of today's episode we're going to be talking about a very heavy subject today sorry we're subjecting y'all to three weeks of sad I this was just kind of popped into my head like last week and I was like I'm not really sure like I was kind of debating doing that and maybe something a little more lighthearted but then I heard this mentioned on one of my favorite podcasts and I decided to take a note out of Emily's book and be like okay the universe is speaking to me and saying that I should cover this topic because I think it's very important I was just telling Emily before we started recording I think you know it's very important to note history because we don't want things we don't want to repeat the hard lessons that we've learned this particular story is an extremely hard learned lesson and there are there whatever side you're on there are people that are currently working to dismantle or eliminate unions and there are people working to dismantle workplace regulations and safety policies to increase profit for corporations and that's really what the story is about and I just think it's very important for us to re-examine also I learned about this in middle school do you remember yeah I don't know if you remember this Emily I remember this very distinctly and maybe other kids have had this horrifying assignment that we had to do but again we're talking about the triangle shortwave factory fire today and there was a survivor who survived in a horrible horrible way and we had to write a letter from her perspective and I was like how am I supposed to write from the perspective of a woman who survived this horrific fire and just like by accident lived even though like yeah it's right the river middle like I think I was in having to do this assignment like what what is that yeah I don't even remember what I wrote I think I blacked out yeah yeah I remembered it when I was researching this I was like I remember having to write a letter from the perspective of the survivor what the hell was that about yeah but also I don't think enough detail not for like what happened but the context of the situation like I had no idea what the context was for the story and I will go into detail about that today and also just like the last couple weeks I will not we will not be doing a skit today out of respect for the nature of this story yeah yeah that was that was my thought so I'm just going to go and jump on in so our story begins at the beginning of the 20th century in New York City right in like the 1900s at this time there are a ton of immigrants coming into New York City to chase that American dream to escape hardships going on in their home countries and they're looking for work a lot of young people especially are moving to the US a lot of families and a lot of these young people are getting jobs not only to support their families at home or in the US but also send money home to their family remaining family members in their home countries and this kind of sucks because a lot of the work that was available over like really hard conditions very physical long long hours very little pay a lot of children were working like some like little kids were regularly like working in factories to make as much money as possible for their families to survive so it's really not a good situation starting off with and our our story today takes place specifically on the Lower East Side of New York City and it's like a garment district here there are hundreds of garment factories up and down the streets of the Lower East Side there are most of these workers are young immigrant girls specifically some as young as 10 very young but most are teenagers or young women the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is our subject for today and it was owned by two Jewish Russian immigrants Max Blank and Isaac Harris who had come to the US about 20 years prior and I'm going to refer to them as B&H during this story because they're usually referred to as the two of them and I do I can do what I want because it's my business so they you know they came to the US they were they were very hard-working men they really put in the effort to become entrepreneurs and businessmen and they eventually built they bought the Ash Building and which is I think now the Brown Building in New York City but when it was built it was like super advanced at the time and the builders even said it had it was mostly fireproof which I think at the time one source I read said for the standards at the time it was considered fireproof and not nearly fireproof by today's standards yeah yeah so on the Ash Building on the 8th 9th and 10th floors they had the Triangle Shirtwaist Company which was an extremely successful business it was considered a quote modern factory with more space and more ventilation and I didn't know what a shirtwaist was so Emily I put a picture of a shirtwaist in the the skip yes that first picture so it's a women's blouse that was very popular in like the late 1800s usually paired with a skirt petticoat all the layers that women were at the time but the yeah it really emphasized like broad shoulders a large bust and a very small waist and the Triangle Company had very intricate very luxurious designs lace and stuff and all that when it was starting out it was like I said extremely successful I earned over a million dollars a year in the early 1900s mm-hmm yeah it was yeah crazy money but like the Triangle Shirtwaist Company is not the only one in the area there are hundreds of factories lining the blocks fighting for a slimmer and slimmer market as we get into the 1900s the especially in the 1910s shirtwaists are starting to fall out of style a little bit the styles leaning more towards what would eventually become the fashion the 20s like more more dresses more loose style not as form-fitting don't need the corsets all that so B&H like okay we've got a figure out how to maximize our profits so they actually went out and got the most advanced sewing machines at the time they were electric powered and they could produce about 3,000 stitches a minute whereas the foot pedal sewing machines could only do about 34 like three four yes yes so they were able to really maximize their output and another way that and this is important for us to again gain more context to the story is that the way like B&H should not hire their workers they worked with subcontractors and the subcontractors would hire employees and pay them so B&H never really knew how many people they had at any one time or what they were being paid and this did not really work out in the workers favor because the subcontractors were trying they were rushing towards the bottom they wanted to be the cheapest so they were hired but then they that kind of got pushed on to the workers as well so they got very minimal pay and there's no regulations at this time and there have been pushes for more regulations especially like in the workforce for a while I'm sure nationwide but especially in New York and just nothing was really being done about it unfortunately and although B&H were unaware how many employees they had and what they were paid there were about 500 employees on these three floors of the ash building yeah there are also foreman who would walk up and down the aisles like watching the workers and again most of the workers are women not all of them but most of them young women they wouldn't let them drink water or use the bathroom and if a woman was injured a lot of times she would just like take care of it like where she was because she couldn't get up and leave or her pay could be docked yeah if they weren't productful enough or they may or if they made mistakes their pay was docked and their pay was docked to pay for needles and electricity for doing their job like they I think they have like they weren't forbidden for like the entire day because a lot of these women work 14-hour days but I'm sure it was minimal like oh you've used the bathroom too many times or oh you're in the bathroom for too long whatever and they only made a maximum of two dollars a day for 14 hours six days a week it was very grueling and a lot of these women are just sewing sewing sewing sewing sewing sewing sewing doing the same thing for 14 hours a day and just to kind of degrade them even more they on their every single day on their way out of the building their bags were checked to make sure they weren't stealing any materials and the thing about the ash building especially on these three floors there were two exits from the building there was the the Green Street exit which was the one that was used and then there was a Washington Place exit and that one was always locked because they didn't want employees to sneak out of the back exit and steal materials this is going to be extremely important later so remember there was two exits Washington Place was always locked the Green Street exit was only one open so like I said so that was just kind of the overview of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory the owners kind of the situation that these girls are in like I said there's no regulations going on citywide for worker protections there's no health and safety policies and it got to the point where people had enough so on October 4th 1909 garment workers all across New York City went on strike it got upwards of ten to twenty thousand workers it was a huge strike the two big powerhouses for the big thing was they wanted unions because unions they were able to better negotiate on behalf of the workers for better pay better workplace conditions so the big power the big union powerhouses that were helping these strikes were the International Ladies Garment Workers Union or the ILGWU which kind of a monster of an acronym but we'll go with it and in the Women's Trade Union League or the WTUL and they were working with the strikers to advocate for improved workplace conditions and regulations so like I said the picketers they're advocating for unions and unions equal workplace protections and more rights within the workplace and the capitalists the owners of these factories and all that did not want this because they wanted to exploit the workers as much as possible to maximize their profit because if there is a union they can better negotiate for more pay and if they get more pay that's less money for you the capitalists and the New York government was like all these industrialists and capitalists are our friends and we're not really going to do anything about it yeah and it got to the point where the strike was starting to become very very popular especially on the garment workers and 400 triangle workers walked out remember there are 500 employees and 400 walked out that went on strike and they protested for about six weeks despite the physical and verbal harassment they're receiving daily so when the absolutely when the triangle workers went on strike B&H hired scabs to keep working and scabs are if you don't know their people who are hired during a strike and they also B&H also hired security and thugs to attack the strikers they hired sex workers to harass them and they even got policemen to arrest the strikers yeah and it wasn't just B&H but they were mentioned in a documentary I watched so by November 1909 so about a month later there were calls for an industry-wide strike over 500 factories at this point were not in production because of the strike going on there was this badass woman named Clara Lemlich she so there was a big assembly and they were like should we have a national strike should we not what are we going to do and Clara Lemlich she was a young woman who had just been like a couple days prior like severely assaulted by thugs and like had six broken ribs she got up and was like major strike everyone strike and everyone was like yeah so the strike really went in full force at this point and it got it got so bad that some of the smaller factories started giving into the workers demands because they were like we're about to go under yes we'll submit and so the smaller factories once they agreed to the picketers demands they started going back into production because the workers went back to work like once they got their better conditions and higher pay and lower hours they went back to work because they still needed money like these picketers were not getting paid during this and they are sacrificing the well-being of their own families to strike for better conditions and B&H they in response they started a Manufacturers Association to kind of keep all the capitalists together like okay how we're going to handle these strikers and keep maximizing our own profits so like I said they keep they were attack hiring people to attack the strikers and a lot of workers were arrested and jailed or sent to workhouses which are really not good situations to be in right right and the police brutality got so bad that 10,000 people showed up to protest against the police brutality in front of like City Hall they were like do something about this this is not right and like we know that the what they say about New Yorkers you know they all stick together and like it that's very evident in this story like the everyday people they they're like this is not right but again this the government didn't really do anything they didn't want to change the status quo they were just like oh so one a woman named Ann Morgan she's the daughter JP Morgan like industrialist JP Morgan and all the Vanderbilt Belmont they were two socialites and they were like you know what this is a great cause our fellow ladies deserve to be safe and paid well and you know have shorter hours so they picked up they supported the strike and they were marching on the front lines with them and this helped the strikers because people were less likely to attack the strikers because they didn't want to accidentally attack like a socialite and their involvement caused more people to become more open to the strike and public favor of the strike started becoming more positive and they're like oh okay like yeah these ladies they they're on to something here you know like they deserve to they want to work but they want to get paid for their work and not drop dead at the age of 25 so B&H eventually said they would agree to pay to the pay in hours conditions but refuse any kind of union and the triangle workers refused these conditions unfortunately as the strike continued the attitude is that it was becoming more quote-unquote socialist and that caused kind of more negative opinion to be viewed of the strike and even Ann Morgan dipped out of supporting the protest because it was too socialist for her so more and more factories started submitting to the strikers demands and allowed the workers to have unions they started getting back to work eventually the triangle factory workers like they did reach an agreement for better pay and fewer hours but they were not allowed to have a union and no changes to workplace safety were made yeah but the actual conditions where they had to work were not improved at all unfortunately so that's kind of the backstory to help us understand where we're going to enter on March 25th 1911 so this day it's a beautiful day people are enjoying their Saturday in Washington Park where people are shopping they're enjoying the park it's a nice day and then the workers at the triangle factory are they're super excited because it's almost closing time there it's almost ready to go they're about to have their day off they're ready to leave at some point don't know when don't know why I don't know how a cigarette is dropped on the eighth floor of the ash building and a fire starts so the eighth floor they start evacuating because the fire starts picking up very quickly this is a very flammable environment someone calls yeah cotton and there's like in in the documentary I watch there is a note that the particles in the air made us like all the dust and fabric particles in the air made it spread even faster so someone was able to call up to the 10th floor where B&H were and B&H were able to make it to the roof of the ash building and make it to another building and they escaped no one told the people on the ninth floor that there was a fire and there's no fire alarm there were 200 people on this floor no one told them that there was a fire and you guys I'm starting to yeah this is going to be very hard to listen to I'm not going to get into detail about what like there's some detail I'm going to be getting into not like super gruesome but I'm going to be saying some very hard things to hear so if you this is not an episode that you want to listen to you can skip it that's fine but it is very important because we need to know exactly what these women went through to prevent it from happening again so the fire eventually made its way to the ninth floor and workers started panicking and they tried to escape so they go to the Green Street exit and it's covered in fire so they don't have a way to leave down the stairs there is an elevator the elevator car comes up a bunch of people get into the elevator car it goes down some other people are trying to escape out of the the fire escape because there is a fire escape and then people are trying to open the Washington Place door which is locked and there are multiple survivor accounts saying it was locked unfortunately the fire escape was not well-maintained and it ended up collapsing under the weight of all the people that were on it and Emily I actually I don't have they're not graphic pictures but I do have some pictures for you if you scroll down and I'll get more into like the the layout of the building but if you scroll down two more you can see what the the fire escape and it just called it completely collapsed mm-hmm mm-hmm so I'm going to ask you to scroll back up to the the representation of the the building so this isn't this is a diagram of the ninth floor and I'm not going to go into each point but I want you to notice that the tables are incredibly long there's no breaks in the tables so people that are like at this bottom corner bottom left-hand corner they are completely stuck by rows and rows and rows of tables and they either have to jump over the tables which not all can do because there are people that you know not not all the the workers were young like there were some older women and men that couldn't necessarily jump or they had to run to the very end of the table which will look like there could be about 20 or so sewing machines to a table right and there's 200 people in this room so additionally again the the Washington Place exit was locked and then the Green Street exit was covered in fire and boxes and they couldn't escape that way some people were able to get escape throughout the elevator but then the fire escape collapsed so there's stuck now so the fire department was called let me get back to my notes I'm sorry oh let me sit back so the factory like I said before was the perfect kindling for the fire there are tons of fabric the wooden tables the particles in the air were just an unfortunate accelerant for the fire and the only fire safety measures on the floor were buckets of water that were like in the corners that were at this point inaccessible because of the fire so you have all these people that are trapped now at this point firefighters made their way to the building they're really trying to put out the fire one more elevator car made it up to the ninth floor and people got you know got in made their way down some women were jumping on top of the car or like sliding down the cables to like ride the shaft down but the crowd crush got really bad and some women were pushed into the shaft so yes and at this point outside again this is a busy Saturday afternoon in New York so now there's like a thousand people gathered around this building that's on fire watching what's happening trying to help but no one really knows what to do the fireman's ladders and their water hoses only got up to the sixth floor they were not tall enough to get not even to the eighth floor and they had nets and we're trying to catch women that were jumping out of the windows but the nets were ripping upon impact and it was so bad that one account said that the fireman's hands were just ripped to shreds from trying to hold on to the nets to catch the women jumping from nine stories up and they just couldn't do anything about it more as the fire raged more and more workers started pressing against the windows and then the window shattered and a bunch of people came tumbling out of the windows yeah this is this is really hard to listen to and it's really hard to say honestly and some workers had to make the choice to stay inside and burn to death or jump out of the windows yeah yeah one yeah I'm almost done going into the details but one detail I think is very important it's very it's very graphic I'm sorry but one account from a New York firefighter said that the bodies on the sidewalk were piled three to four high in front of the floor or in front of the fire so after about 30 minutes after the alarm went out to call the fire department the fire they were able to get the fire under control but it took a few hours for them to put it out completely in the end 145 workers died in this fire about so there were 500 employees total about 200 on the ninth floor but there were eight floor employees as well most of the eight employees on the eighth floor escaped but I don't think all of them did and I actually after I go over this I have an interview that I found from a survivor so 53 victims jumped or fell from the ninth story window 19 fell in or jumped in the elevator shaft and were killed there 20 were killed when they fell off the fire escape when it collapsed at least 50 burned to death 23 of the the deceased were men and the rest women and more than half of those victims were teenagers the the youngest victim was 14 and there was one jumper who survived because she landed on a pile of bodies that cushioned her fall and that was the perspective of from this story that we had to write a letter about I know I know that is some morbid shit and I know hey write write a letter to your family from the perspective of a woman who survived a nine-foot story jump because she landed on enough bodies to cushion her fall what the fuck yeah yeah it's fine yeah and many of the victims were Jewish and Italian immigrants that was the a big population of victims yeah so I read an interview so there is a really really amazing source I found it's by it's an archive of the fire that's maintained by Cornell University and I have a link to it in the show notes it goes into detail about the fire it has like timelines it has all these like secondary secondary sources it's got interviews from survivors it's got a lot of information I got a lot of my info for this from that website and there's a guy who went around doing interviews with survivors and he ended up writing a book his name is Leon Stein and I found this one interview for this couple Isadora and Celia Saltz Pollack Celia was a worker at the triangle factory with her sister and Isadora worked a few buildings down at another factory I think he was a manager or something so and I thought this was neat they were both involved in the 1909 protests and Isadora mentioned how he would be stuck with pins while protesting like hat pins because he was like helping his wife protest and I'm sure he was involved too because he worked in the same industry just not at the same building and he also was in the funeral march as well that happens later on but Celia didn't go because I'm about to go into why she didn't attend so Celia in her interview this took place like 47 years later so a while afterwards she recounted how she was working on the eighth floor near the elevator and the stairwell when the fire broke out she said it spread extremely quickly like lightning fast she immediately made her way to the elevator and she was swept into it by the crowd and she was separated from her sister she made it outside and when she made it outside she saw people falling from the upper floor and she was just completely traumatized by it she said the next thing she knew she was being she was in a restaurant being comforted by her sister who made it out and some other people and actually I didn't write it down in the interview she told Leon that her sister said that she had jumped over a bunch of dead bodies in the stairwell to make it out of the building and she like her and Isadora laughed it off they're like oh she's 14 she had no idea she was talking about and Leon was like no that's very likely that that happened and they're like 47 years later and they're like what I don't think they even realized how bad it was and Celia survived it so Celia was 18 at the time and she just immigrated from Russia two years prior and I thought and according to again according to her sister someone managed to unlock the locked door and that's how she was able to make it out and she said she had another sister who had worked on the ninth floor but a few months prior she had told her sister to work somewhere else because she was like we all three of us don't need to get the same company we need to diversify go work at another factory so she like inadvertently saved her sister's life by doing that I know so next is the aftermath and I'm going to go into like a little bit of the general aftermath and then like the bad aftermath and then the good aftermath because there's both and I wasn't sure how to go about it so I just separated by both I'm going to be jumping around a little bit chronologically I just wanted to end this very tragic tale on like positive notes and the positives that came from this horrific tragedy so immediately after the fire the fire department and the police department were having to go collect the bodies and collect their their items their personal belongings one firefighter said there's just all over the sidewalk it was like like hats and shoes and combs just everywhere and the documentary I watched made sure to point out that a lot of the policemen that were charged with this were some of the same policemen that were tasked with beating these women a couple years prior when they were on strike and now mm-hmm yeah I really think it was and a lot of the the policemen had to rotate on shifts and cataloging cataloging the possessions of the dead because oh my god like how how awful and traumatizing it was like once an hour they're rotated out and the day after the incident and makeshift morgue had been set up for loved ones to identify the deceased and I want to say this so everyone is aware if you google triangle shortwave factory fire I had already seen these pictures because they were in the documentary but it will show pictures of this makeshift morgue and people like the like when the fire occurred and the bodies outside of the on the sidewalk like ones that had jumped from the building and then the morgue so be very careful when googling this because if you see pictures it will show a lot of dead bodies don't yeah yeah don't yeah don't look at the pictures because they're again like I'm a true crime listener but it's seeing them it's a whole nother thing and it's very graphic so some and I found this out I I found in on the 100th anniversary of the fire Barack Obama had like a an address to mark there was like a not a celebration but like a memorial on the 100th anniversary and in his speech he said that some of the victims weren't even identified until 2011 but it was the last of the victims so they had all been identified by 2011 and there is a list of the victims on the Cornell website so it has all of their names it's interesting there's a lot more information about the deceased than the survivors on the deceased it has like their name their age and where they were from whereas there's a list of survivors but it's like sometimes a name sometimes an age and like their job but it's very scant and on March 30th just a few days after the fire the jumper who had survived ended up passing away from her injuries her name was Sarah Kupla and she was 16 years old I know okay so we're going to get into the the bad aftermath before we get into the good aftermath so on April 11th B&H were indicted on seven counts of second degree manslaughter for the fire and the big charge was that they knowingly locked the Washington Place exit and that caused the 145 deaths or now 146 deaths so the point of the trial was to determine if they were at fault for the door being locked and their defense attorney was Max Stewart who was very good at his job so because of his defense the jury could not determine if B&H were actually guilty of or at fault for locking the door so they were acquitted and they took their insurance payout tried to dip there was significant public outcry at this and there were 23 civil suits that were brought against them three years later after the fire on March 11th 1914 B&H settled for what amounts to be about $75 per life lost yeah just a few days after the fire B&H set up a new factory and investigations found that they were not safe there were no fire escapes or enough exits blank was charged for locking exits during working hours and he was fined $20 which the judge apologized for they're like oh you know all these new regulations coming out sorry we gotta charge you $20 for locking exits the fact that people couldn't escape yeah it's and just four months later after this incident another investigation found trash and waste everywhere in some places six feet deep with flammable materials all over the place and the Triangle Waste Company was ordered to halt operations in 1918 yeah exactly four months prior to the shirt the triangle fire on November 25th 1910 a fire broke out at a four-story factory in Newark New Jersey where 25 workers died and then on several decades later on March 18th 1958 an industrial oven exploded at the Monarch garment shop in Manhattan there were no sprinklers and again this is 1958 there were no sprinklers no fire escapes or even adequate fire alarms there were workers on the fourth floor who are completely unaware a fire was happening until an alarm went off on the street eight minutes after the fire started and the floor collapsed because of this and it killed 24 workers and more outrage swept through which I'll get into the public outrage in just a second but the one positive from that was that the ILGWU and the New York Fire Department created a fire warden program to continue to investigate and ensure that fire safety is up to snuff and the last negative that I have is that sweatshops are still a thing in the U.S. I found this on the the Cornell website but this is a quote quote 67% of Los Angeles garment factories and 63% of New York garment factories violate minimum wage and overtime laws 98% of all Los Angeles garment factories have workplace health and safety problems serious enough to lead to severe injuries or death to this day is still happening and these shops continue to exploit especially undocumented immigrants mm-hmm I'm about to get into the good so it's bittersweet so the the ILGWU set up a mourning day for like in New York City a hundred and twenty thousand people marched in the funeral and 300,000 people lined up the streets to watch the funeral march the documentary I watched the 10% of New York City came to watch this funeral or participate in it this was a loss deeply deeply felt by the people of New York local organizations came together to help the victim's families and raised money and sent money to not only the families in New York City but also to their families abroad because a lot of these people were sending family to money to their families overseas and this included the WTUL which I mentioned earlier the workman's circle and arbiter ring the Jewish daily forward and the United Hebrew trades all these people came together to form the joint relief committee and they were raising money and just they helped continue to pay survivors because they were out of work now so they continue to pay pensions they provide a child care for victims families and children who are orphaned in the fire they also help find new jobs for survivors when they healed from their injuries so they're doing a lot of really great work to help these survivors they also paired up with the American Red Cross who also provided relief in the end the joint relief committee donated and dispersed about $30,000 which it is almost a million dollars to help support all these victims and finally after this horrific tragedy public outcry and outrage forced the government to begin enacting workplace regulations and protections people not just workers but the people of New York were like we need unions to counteract the greed and exploitative practices and acts conducted by these capitalists who own these sweatshops and factory safety commission was created by the government and they started going in and inspecting all these different factories inspected over 2,000 factories within like the first like year or two no but they should have yes in less than two years the findings from this factory safety commission helped pass over 30 regulatory laws for workplace safety these also included minimum wage requirements maximum workplace hours and child labor laws and this is a quote from I believe which website was it I think it was a documentary they quote address each and every failure at the triangle factory and quote so every point of failure that happened there they addressed in regulatory law and this is my last little little section which I thought it was just a cool thing so there's a woman named Frances Perkins she was a witness to the tragedy she later became the Secretary of Labor and SDRs administration she was the first female cabinet secretary yes she and other community leaders in New York including the mayor of New York who witnessed the fireworks to codify workplace safety standards into law so she was one of those people out like we are passing laws to ensure safety of our workers I just thought that was neat and there's also a note this isn't about Francis moving on a little bit this one's sad I didn't mean to put it on the end but this fire was the quote deadliest workplace tragedy in New York's history until 9-11 so it was really major and then I have one last quote I got from the OSHA website about the fire and they had like a hundred year OSHA personally held like a 100 year remembrance of the fire quote it is the sustained legacy of reforms that paved the way for OSHA's 40 years of protecting workers as we celebrate one anniversary and more another OSHA remembers these 146 workers and the more than 4,000 workers who died on the job in 2009 by refusing to accept these tragedies as a normal cost of doing business and that's a quote from Dr. David Michaels who's the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA. So yeah this was not a very fun one very very tragic. Oh yeah yeah I've forgotten I put it up there so that was a political cartoon that came out after the fire to really I think it really represents the public's anger and about the injustice that happened here and it's very graphic honestly it's like it's very very powerful but there's a triangle and the sides of the triangle say rent and there's a skeleton above that profit with a fat capitalist crying and then on the bottom of the triangle says interest and there's a half-burned woman staking out of it and on the the paper I was able to see what I said earlier and then it's stabbed with a knife this is quartz yes mm-hmm right he's not crying for the that half-burned woman mm-hmm and those tears are so cartoonish like yeah mm-hmm mm-hmm yeah I was very creepy I put that in there because like again I thought it was very representative of the rage that people felt after this and in the documentary I watched like people like the the protests that all happened two years prior and these women were saying our workplace is not safe we want better workplace conditions and two years later there's a fire and like all these people are watching it like these women said they were not safe in the workplace and now there's a fire and 146 people died like it's just so again I thought this is very important because and I've seen this quote on the internet and I don't know where it came from I think it was a tumblr post I saw years ago but regulations safety regulations are written in blood the reasons safety regulations exist is because businesses historically have exploited workers and actively put them in harm's way to save on cost to maximize profit and right and even then like yeah it's begrudging and even then there are times where employers don't follow safety rules and they get fined and they're like I'll just pay the fine and just keep doing what I'm doing because it'd be less expensive than actually changing my practices again it just comes down to money in the end and with talk of government officials working to repeal safety regulations I think this is a very topical subject for the time because this is a reminder that we cannot backslide on safety regulations they exist for a reason yeah with enough with enough money to survive on without having to be stuck in a dark room for more than half a day like over 12 hours being able to enjoy your life and not fearing that you're going to die anytime you walk into your workplace so I'm going to go into my sources because I really like I recommend you all checking them out if you have a stomach for them so I went to the OSHA website OSHA had a blurb about the factory fire and it's 100th anniversary there's also a presidential proclamation I got from Obama Whitehouse.archives.gov link is in the show notes but he just had a it's not a very long speech just a little one about the fire there was a documentary I watched from PBS called Triangle Fire I thought it was a really well done documentary but again there are very graphic images in it so if you want to check it out just be aware and then the the trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu is the archive that Cornell University maintains about the fire it's really well done there's so much information and I have a link to the victim list that they have it's very extensive yeah don't go too deep into it yeah yeah I only read a couple and then like reading the interviews I got to that the one I found I was like I feel like if I read any more I'm just going to be very very sad but you know I it's it's there if you guys want to look more into it get more perspective on survivors and look at the names of the victims very important yeah that is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire it's very heavy and we'll definitely try to get some some lighter topics for you all next week we need we need we need some some lighthearted shit in here now after three weeks of sad. I have an idea of my my next topic that I am like it shouldn't have any darkness to it I'd be very surprised if it did but you never know it's history yeah yes yes I trust you're going to find a really good funny one because you're very good at that yes we're definitely going to need it we got some some fun things planned to coming up and when is it is it May yet? our anniversary yay! yes happy one year let's see this will air yeah yeah because I think yours are going to be the second and the ninth and mine will be the 16th so um I'd want it on the 9th oh yeah we can do it we can do it for the ninth one yeah so hope you guys liked our little special anniversary surprise we've been working on it for almost a year yes please get one yeah yeah if you sign up for a patreon you'll get two stickers and our monthly bonus at the says at patreon.com slash illiquid history you get to know learn all about Emily y'all yeah yes ill-equipped history podcast group and page at ill-equipped history and we make very funny videos I lol every time at ill-equipped history yes at ill-equipped history at gmail.com no spaces or dashes we'd love to hear from you rate us the hiccup I'm sorry yeah spread the word yes we'll try to keep those as sparing as possible sparingly sparing look not as often as possible yeah sorry guys we did not we did not discuss our topics before picking them like we usually don't so usually it's fine but you guys get like a month yeah mm-hmm yay yes yes who join me in old age of course yeah alright yeah let's let's let these good people go and watch watch a funny movie or cuddle with your pet after this yeah don't do that do not lock doors yes pay them for what they're worth which is a lot it's infinity pay them infinity dollars ok bye