(no subject)
When I was in junior high, I started reading these sort of historical fiction books. They were Young Adult entry-level historical romances, basically, with the premise being that a girl in some historically significant era had to choose between two suitors set against the backdrop of Real History. I liked that the girl didn't always choose the 'romantic' suitor and sometimes took the safe path of the 'expected' suitor because I felt that was more realistic to women's historical behaviour.
One of them was the story of a young girl, whose Jewish parents had left Eastern Europe to escape persecution and violence. The girl, now beginning her own start in life, took a job at a "ladies' garment factory" where she made shirtwaists. Much of the book focused on what I thought were weirdly restrictive and unbelievable policies. I thought, "you can't stop for lunch? Really? You have to be searched every day and the windows are nailed shut? That's ridiculous, who would work in conditions like that?" The book ended with a harrowing account of a workplace fire, which left me, even at 15, shaken and alarmed.
That book, of course, was talking about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, and imagine my surprise a couple of years later in AP History class to find out that not only was the description of her workplace accurate, the description of the fire in the book was probably lifted directly from eyewitness accounts.
In a ten-story building, there were no fire exits. One of two doors to the street was locked to prevent theft and the only key was held by someone who escaped without using it. There was no fire alarm. Months' worth of fabric scraps and pattern cuttings were stored in open bins. In a building filled to the brim with flammable materials, there were no buckets of water or sand. The broken fire escape buckled under the weight of those using it, pitching screaming women to the street below as it fell and leaving even more women stranded on the floors above. Managers fled the scene without a thought for the women working for them.
One hundred years ago today, young women groped through smoke and death, looking for a way out of hell. From the ninth and tenth floors, burning women leaped to escape the flames, shooting like stars to the street below. They died gasping, they died screaming, they died as sisters and as friends. Almost one hundred and fifty people were killed in the fire, and most of them were young, poor, female immigrants. They died because they had no power, no influence, no money, no standing.
They died, as people in this country so often do, because they were poor and born into the wrong gender and ethnicity to be considered fully human.
Today, I sit in my windowed office for my forty-hour workweek, and I appreciate all the little things unions have done for me. I like my weekends, I like my paid holidays and my vacations. Those things, they're kinda nice. But what really matters to me is that I have never worked in a place where someone could lock me in a burning building, and because of the workers who organized and demanded safer working conditions a hundred years ago, I will never have to. Because of workers who organized and demanded to be treated like human beings, I have recourse against being forced to do unsafe, demeaning, or dangerous work.
Not everyone in this country has that privilege. Immigrant laborers work in sweatshops in our very own cities. Women brought to this country under false pretenses for a 'nanny' or 'clerical' job are forced into the sex trade, often beaten or imprisoned if they try to resist. Children are sold into sweatshop slavery to pay off their parents' 'debt' to the people who brought them here. Whole families are threatened with deportation if they ask for safer working conditions. We see so clearly what unethical corporations will do to people if they hold all the negotiating power over their workers, if those thin safeguards of OSHA and workers' rights are stripped away.
And now, we see two things that threaten to endanger more workers, not fewer: unions that have forgotten it is their sole purpose to work for the rights and protection of the workers, and politicians who seek to score points by using union abuses to strip away the power to defend those rights and protections. We've come a long way in the last century, far enough that the conditions under which the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory operated seem utterly alien and incomprehensible in the context of today's workplace. How can we possibly fathom, as we look back to that day, taking away the very right to organize and address our employers as a unified whole? It's unlikely that sweatshop conditions could ever become widespread again, but we've not yet closed the door on a boss being able to coerce sexual favors out of a desperate employee who needs her paycheck, or a company being able to cut corners so closely that we lose eleven workers in an oil rig explosion. We are not yet at a place where collective bargaining has become irrelevant.
There must be a balance between union excesses and corporate exploitation. Michigan, a closed-shop state with an economy driven into the ground by combined union and corporate greed, is clear testament that over-empowering union interests is a bad long-term strategy. But taking away unions is an even worse one, a strategy that threatens to leave millions of workers forced to choose between unsafe work and no work at all.
So many of the things in my life were dearly bought. My freedom of speech stands because of those who bled to defend it, in and out of uniform. My right to vote comes from women willing to be beaten and jailed for it, and men willing to stand with them and share power. My reproductive freedoms are bought with the blood women shed for decades in back alleys, and the blood of doctors shot by fanatics. And my safe, comfortable workplace owes its origin to women so terrified to burn alive that they leaped ten stories to certain death, to slaughterhouse workers who lost life and limb on the killing floor, to coal miners coughing up black chunks of their lungs, to desperate people willing to risk what dangerous jobs they had in hopes that organizing to improve them would give everyone a better life. The least I can do is speak out in defense of what they built for me.
I love you all.