Case Study

Triangle Shirtwaist fire

The stairwell doors were locked, and the fire ladders reached only the sixth floor.

United States

On Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building near Washington Square in lower Manhattan.1 The Triangle Waist Company occupied the top three floors. Its 500 employees, most of them young immigrant women recently arrived from Eastern Europe, were finishing their shifts when flames spread from worktable to worktable.

The fire escape collapsed under the weight of fleeing workers. The stairwell doors had been locked by management, reportedly to prevent theft and unauthorized breaks. The New York City Fire Department arrived, but its ladders extended only to the sixth floor, two stories below the fire.2

Within half an hour, 146 workers were dead.3 At least 125 of them were women, some as young as fifteen, who had worked seven-day weeks in thirteen-hour shifts for roughly six dollars.4 Dozens died from smoke inhalation or burns. Others jumped from the ninth-floor windows to the sidewalk below while crowds of onlookers watched helplessly.

146

Workers killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire on March 25, 1911

The fire was not an anomaly. An estimated 100 workers died on the job every day in the United States around 1911.5 What made Triangle different was the political moment. Two years earlier, in 1909, more than 20,000 shirtwaist makers had walked off the job in the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, demanding higher wages, shorter hours, and safer conditions.5 Triangle's owners had settled with the strikers on pay and hours but refused to discuss workplace safety.

Frances Perkins, who later became the first woman in a U.S. presidential cabinet, witnessed the fire from Washington Place.6 Within three months, the governor of New York signed a law creating the Factory Investigating Commission. In 1912, New York enacted 25 new labor laws covering fire safety, factory inspection, and employment rules for women and children. Many of those reforms became federal law during the New Deal. In 1970, the Occupational Safety and Health Act created OSHA, an agency whose origins trace directly to the locked doors of the Asch Building.3

Timeline

1909

More than 20,000 shirtwaist makers struck in the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand.

1911

A fire at the Triangle Waist Company killed 146 garment workers on March 25.

1912

New York enacted 25 new labor protection laws in direct response to the fire.

1970

The Occupational Safety and Health Act created OSHA, tracing its origins to the Triangle fire.

Endnotes

1 David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).

2 Library of Congress, "Today in History: March 25," citing newspaper accounts from 1911.

3 U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, "The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire."

4 Howard Markel, "How the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Transformed Labor Laws," PBS NewsHour, April 1, 2021.

5 AFL-CIO, "Triangle Shirtwaist Fire: Labor History Events."

6 Kirstin Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2009).