FOR GARMENT WORKERS, March 25, 2011, was a critical moment. Hundreds poured into the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Many famous political figures had spoken in the column-lined auditorium during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, President Abraham Lincoln, antislavery activists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Lakota chief Red Cloud and Arapahoe chief Little Raven. Now, the room buzzed as a thirty-five-year-old Bangladeshi garment union leader named Kalpona Akter slowly climbed the stairs to the stage. “In Bangladesh,” she said quietly, fiercely, “it is not 2011; it’s 1911.”
Students, teachers, garment workers, union retirees, and low-wage workers had come together to remember a terrible fire that, one hundred years earlier, had changed the course of American history. Crowding the Great Hall that night there were also coal miners, catfish processors, construction workers, hotel workers, and taxi drivers, representing millions of others who perform the twenty-first century’s most dangerous jobs. They were not there to commemorate the 1911 fire as a moment burned into the lives of long-dead workers, a catastrophe that changed everything for the better. They were there to remind us all that danger is still a daily reality for workers in this country and, even more so, around the world.
One hundred and two years earlier, in November 1909, a twenty-three-year-old Jewish immigrant dressmaker named Clara Lemlich gave a brief, impassioned speech from the same stage to an audience of garment workers in their teens and twenties. After a parade of male union leaders and middle-class women advised the young women not to go on strike, Lemlich had jumped onto the stage. “I have something to say,” she shouted, interrupting the official program.
It was a bold assertion for a lowly “girl worker,” one of millions of poor immigrants then living and working in New York. Speaking in Yiddish, Lemlich described the dangerous conditions for workers in the new ready-to-wear industry. She was angry, as were the women who listened that evening. “I am one of those who suffer from the conditions being described here,” she said. “And I move that we call a general strike.”
It was as if a tide had broken. The cautious elders could not hold them back. Hundreds of women threw their hats into the air, pledging to uphold the strike. Over the next few months, between twenty thousand and forty thousand young garment workers, immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe, Catholics from Ireland and southern Italy, and a few native-born white and black Protestants marched and picketed along the streets of Lower Manhattan. It was the largest women’s strike the country had ever seen.1
In the years that followed, women garment workers across the US organized, struck, and unionized. But they found that unionism could only take them so far. They also needed enforceable labor law. That need was indelibly burned into the national consciousness on March 25, 1911, when a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, in the heart of Greenwich Village, took 146 young workers’ lives. In a terrible half hour, thousands watched as young people jumped to their deaths from eighth-story windows, some burning even as they fell.
Between 1911 and 1938, outrage over the fire galvanized support for the passage of minimum wage, maximum hours, and safety laws. Triangle seared the conscience of a nation, forging a new consensus that workers should not have to put their lives on the line to earn their daily bread. The political fallout from Triangle transformed American law, putting state and federal governments in the business of guaranteeing the safety of workers. There was a backlash. Labor laws were struck down by conservative courts. But they were rewritten and passed again. A new era had begun for American labor. Few could imagine going backward.
For nearly a hundred years, garment unions convened annual commemorations of the fire—solemn events marked by cautionary tales about how bad labor conditions were before unions grew strong, protective legislation was passed, and governments began to enforce workplace safety standards. These commemorations were reminders that unions and government inspectors needed to stay vigilant. But overall, they radiated a sense that much had changed—and for the good. Then, as the fire’s centennial approached, Kalpona Akter and other twenty-first-century labor activists insisted that there was another story to tell. The past was present again.
Akter began to travel the world in 2010, not just to publicize the killing conditions under which clothing was now being made but to let European, Asian, and American consumers know that Bangladeshi garment workers had reached their limit and were rising. They wanted safe working conditions and wages sufficient to support their families. Their protests were huge. Hundreds of thousands of workers were in the streets, blocking roads, staging sit-ins.
A handful of newspapers in the UK covered the turmoil, but the US press paid little attention. Our cities were awash in a flood tide of “fast fashion”—cheap, colorful, plentiful clothing. It was intoxicating and fun. No one wanted to think about where it came from.
Akter began to tour the world to ensure that the cries of Bangladeshi garment workers could be heard beyond the crowded streets and export-processing zones of Dhaka and Chittagong. She was sponsored by UNITE HERE, Canadian public employee unions, the European consumer group Clean Clothes Campaign, and the US-based International Labor Rights Forum, Worker Rights Consortium, and United Students Against Sweatshops. Akter’s tours helped forge a new global alliance to stand with Bangladeshi workers who make the clothing sold on Fifth Avenue, Oxford Street, and the Champs-Élysées, in Tokyo’s Ginza district and Seoul’s Myeongdong district. As the centennial of the 1911 Triangle fire approached, they used the occasion to help consumers see and understand the human costs of the fast-fashion revolution.
Since the 1990s, thousands of workers had been killed and injured in garment factory fires and building collapses in Bangladesh. As a teen, Akter had lived through a garment factory fire. She described it to audiences to make the fear real.
In a crowd of panicked workers she had rushed for the exits. “Then we realized they had locked us in, because they believed maybe we will steal merchandise.” She is still angry, decades later. Staircases were blocked by piles of clothing bound for the US and Europe. When eight hundred workers tried to pour down smoke-filled steps, some were trampled. Others passed out from smoke inhalation. “Finally, we screamed and cried so loud that they opened the door.” On that day, Akter says, she learned the importance of making noise.
Bangladeshi garment workers have been speaking out since then, especially since 2005—protesting, striking, and putting pressure on famous retail brands. As this book goes to press, they are still in the streets. Like berry pickers and fast-food workers, they hope to embarrass major brands into behaving more humanely. After factory fires, Akter sorts through smoking rubble to find labels she knows are there: for Disney, Walmart, Gap, the Children’s Place, Primark, Top Shop, and H&M. Globalized youth culture. Globalized capital. Burned skin and crushed bones. Far from London, New York, and Tokyo where the clothes are sold, Akter holds charred labels up to the cameras so the world can see and understand.2
A few months before the Triangle centennial, a garment factory fire in Dhaka killed scores. The doors were locked. Workers had no other way to flee the burning building than by jumping from the eleventh floor. Horrified crowds watched from the sidewalks below. The falling bodies, burning as they dropped through the sky, looked the same as they had in Greenwich Village one hundred years earlier. Grief-stricken Dhaka families searched bodies lined up on the sidewalk, hoping not to find a loved one. Photographs of their grisly search echoed grim images of makeshift street morgues in 1911 New York, where Triangle’s victims were arrayed.3
As she looked out from the Great Hall stage on March 25, 2011, Kalpona Akter says she thought about Clara Lemlich, whose ninety-five-year-old daughter, Rita Margules, was in the audience. “I came to know that this was the hall where Clara Lemlich spoke,” Akter says. “I was proud to speak from that same stage. UNITE HERE made a poster with Clara Lemlich and me both saying ‘I Have Something to Say.’ That is really a very moving sentence. It speaks volumes.”4
Akter left the stage at the end of her speech, knelt before Rita Margules, and took the old woman’s hand. Lemlich had inspired a generation of Bangladeshi garment workers, she told her. The tiny woman smiled. Then the New York City Labor Chorus, white-haired veterans of earlier union struggles, sang “Solidarity Forever.”
In Dhaka, Akter had made sure that garment workers knew that the Triangle centennial was coming. They marched with banners expressing the solidarity of Bangladeshis with the struggles of American workers, past and present. When Akter came to New York, she brought with her purple T-shirts emblazoned with images of Bangladeshi garment workers and the women of Triangle. They said in English and Bengali: “1911 to 2011: Not One More Fire.”
Akter recalls her first visit to the Triangle site. She was deeply moved to be “walking on that street where so many people worked, where there was so much loss of life. Touching the wall of the building, walking on the sidewalk where so many women jumped to their deaths, hurt so much.” But, says Akter, as she stood with her fingers pressed against the wrought-iron early-twentieth-century building, she felt more than sorrow. She believed that the shirtwaist makers of Triangle were speaking to the women who, in 2011, still worked fourteen-hour days sewing dresses, shorts, and shirts; who still, a century after Triangle, put their lives on the line every day.
What US labor activists won in the aftermath of Triangle, Akter says, “was everything we have worked for, everything we are fighting for.” She believes those gains came in part because American trade unionists kept “the women who died there alive—through prayer, through protest, through anger.” So Akter began to teach Bangladeshi garment workers that history. “We in Bangladesh began to keep them alive too.”
When Akter speaks to audiences in New York and Stockholm, Montreal and Seoul, she echoes arguments that Clara Lemlich made in a 1912 Good Housekeeping article. Lemlich exhorted consumers to be conscious, to demand safer conditions for workers who risked death to make the beautiful clothes they loved. A century later, Akter says, she asks of American and European consumers the same.
But when she speaks of Triangle to Bangladeshi workers, Akter says, her focus is on labor’s victories. “Talking about the fire’s victims,” she believes, “is a way of telling women who are working today, it doesn’t matter what part of the world you work in. If you stand up and fight for change, you can win.”5