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Triangle: Remembering the Fire

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Athena Goldsmith
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« on: March 25, 2011, 10:45:44 pm »

Triangle: Remembering the Fire


Laura Clawson for Daily Kos





Triangle memorial procession
Procession in memory of victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist 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.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/20/957577/-Triangle:-Remembering-the-Fire
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« Reply #1 on: March 25, 2011, 11:16:05 pm »

The Lessons of Triangle Shirtwaist Fire May Be Lost 100 Years Later
Mar 25, 2011 – 9:46 AM




Andrew Schneider

Andrew Schneider Senior Public Health Correspondent
Screams of "Don't jump!" echoed through the canyons of tall buildings. More than 50 bodies littered the streets surrounding 23 Washington Place, so many that New York City's firetrucks were unable to get close enough to raise their ladders. Even if they had, the ladders from nearby Company 20 were too short to reach the eighth, ninth or 10th floors of the burning Triangle Shirtwaist Co. factory.

New York Fire Department reports say the flames, which were probably sparked by a cigarette tossed into a pile of cotton scraps on the eighth floor, rapidly spread to the floors above. The maelstrom of fire was knocked down in 18 minutes -- brief, but long enough to snuff out the lives of 146 workers who were just minutes from heading home from their 52-hour workweek that sunny Saturday afternoon on March 25, 1911.

The victims of that inferno 100 years ago today were almost all new immigrants, mostly women and girls -- Italians, Russians, Hungarians and Germans. Few spoke English.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire 100th Anniversary
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« Reply #2 on: March 25, 2011, 11:17:14 pm »



Left: Firefighters work to douse the flames at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in the Asch Building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place on March 25, 1911, in New York City. Workers were locked into the factory during their shifts, preventing escape. New Yorkers watched in horror from below as workers leaped to their deaths from the windows above. Right: Street view of the building on Sept. 4, 2009. The 1911 fire at the Triangle Waist Co., which claimed the lives of 146 young immigrant workers, is one of the worst disas
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« Reply #3 on: March 25, 2011, 11:18:07 pm »

The youngest victim was only 11, according to the death reports. Most were in their teens, and a few in their early 20s. There were 500 seamstresses and tailors working in the factory. Many on the eighth and tenth floors escaped. Few on the ninth floor had much chance of surviving.

Some stood on the narrow window ledges, alone or clutching friends, waiting for rescue that never came, then jumped or lost their balance and fell to their deaths. The height of the fall was so great that the jumpers tore through the safety nets that a circle of firefighters were frantically moving up and down the street to catch them.

The 146 lives lost in the fire ignited a passion for worker safety laws and indirectly led to the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Yet a century later, the laws that could have saved lives had they been in place on March 25, 1911, are being threatened by budget cuts proposed by a Republican-controlled Congress.

The Lessons From the Tragedy

Many of the deaths from the 1911 fire were preventable.

A flimsy iron fire escape quickly gave way under the weight of the first trying to flee. The single elevator was immobilized by dozens of bodies falling into the shaft as some tried to shimmy down the grease-covered cables.

But the main route to living another day, the exit doors, were blocked by boxes of trash and fabric scrap, or locked by the bosses to prevent workers from stealing the fancy blouses with puffed sleeves and tight bodices that the Triangle Shirtwaist sweatshop produced by the thousands.
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« Reply #4 on: March 25, 2011, 11:18:40 pm »

After the tragedy, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union led a parade of more than 100,000 mourners through the streets of lower Manhattan, and politicians realized that they'd better pay attention to what just happened in their town.

The cry "This shall never happen again" echoed through city halls and state capitols. Officials in many major U.S. cities looked around and found identically dangerous conditions in their factories. Workers in their communities faced the same risk.

Whether it was shame, guilt or genuine concern for the safety of the American worker, politicians promised to do better. First in New York City and then in Albany, lawmakers, ignoring strident objections by the business community, forced through the country's first and strongest worker safety protection laws.

Massachusetts, New Jersey and Illinois soon passed similar safeguards. Fifteen other states tried to do the same, but intense lobbying by industry either blocked the attempts or watered down the legislation to the point of uselessness.

But the fire also produced a champion for a national system of worker safety regulations.

Dedicated to Protecting Workers

The afternoon of the fire, a young social worker named Frances Perkins was having tea with a friend in Greenwich Village when she heard clanging firetruck bells and screams. As she raced toward the noise, she saw black smoke bellowing from the building and watched as the seamstresses leaped or fell to the ground.

Twenty-two years later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Perkins as U.S. secretary of labor, recalled Hilda Solis, who now holds that job.

Perkins never forgot the fire and the trapped workers, and she did much during her 12 years on the job, including creating what would become the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Solis said in recent speeches and op-ed pieces.

Worker safety advocates cite the painful irony that, precisely 100 years to the month after the fire, the House of Representatives has passed a budget bill that would slash nearly $100 million -- about 20 percent -- from OSHA's current budget. About 40 percent of those cuts will be to the agency's enforcement and safety inspectors -- those on the front line of protecting workers.
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« Reply #5 on: March 25, 2011, 11:18:59 pm »

"Lives will be lost because of these proposed cuts. They're devastating," Joel Shufro, executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, told AOL News on Thursday.

"Since its founding, OSHA has been underfunded and understaffed. They currently have enough inspectors to inspect every workplace just once every 143 years. The proposed cuts will cut OSHA's effectiveness even more," he added.

OSHA administrator David Michaels says the House's cutback "would really have a devastating effect on all of our activities."

David Von Drehle wrote what many consider the definitive book on the tragedy in 1911, "Triangle: The Fire that Changed America." He said in the book that history can run backward, and that even much-needed reforms like worker safety gains can be lost again.

"Many of the initial post-Triangle reforms were strenuously opposed by conservative businessmen ... who were soon back in the saddle and able to halt, hamstring or reverse liberal initiatives," he wrote.

The recent GOP sweep has many believing the same thing is happening again.
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« Reply #6 on: March 25, 2011, 11:19:24 pm »

No Surprise That OSHA Was a Target

When the Republicans swept back into power in the House in January, Rep. Darrell Issa, the newly appointed chairman of the House Government Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, told major industries, lobbyists, trade associations and companies large and small that, as head of the congressional watchdog committee, he'd appreciate their views on what government regulations they didn't like and what he should change.

It surprised no one that the Environmental Protection Agency and OSHA were the favorite targets of the hundreds letters that were hand-carried or express-mailed to him.

The California Republican insists that these changes that big business wants will save jobs, but he hasn't explained how to the satisfaction of even some in his own party. Republicans budget cutters say that environmental regulation is harmful to the economy and that OSHA's worker safety actions are unnecessary and detrimental to businesses large and small.

Those involved with worker safety cringe.

"With conservatives in Congress decrying the supposedly "job-killing" effects of OSHA protections, we could be on our way to becoming a First World economy with Third World working conditions," said Tom O'Connor, executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a federation of local and state committees or coalitions on occupational safety and health.

The U.S. has made progress in worker protection, but, he quickly added, it is 29th out of 30 industrialized nations when it comes to safety and health protection for workers, managing to beat out only Turkey.

"Crippling budget cuts like these can only come from lawmakers who are willing to throw hardworking Americans under the bus once they've extracted a vote," Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist for health and environment with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told AOL News.

Her organization is one of the nation's largest environmental action groups, but Sass's concern for worker safety came from her grandmother, Clara Weinstein, a seamstress who was working the day of the fire in another Garment District sweatshop neighboring the Triangle factory building.

Clara was only a young teenager when she left her parents behind in Russia to work in New York City's garment factories and send money home -- "a story repeated every day by immigrant workers, many of them teenagers like my grandmother was," Sass said.

Her grandmother never went to college, but she spoke and read in three languages -- English, Russian and Yiddish -- and she knew wrong from right, Sass recalled. "She always told me she was a dressmaker, but in fact she was an unskilled piece worker on an assembly line in a loud, dusty and very dangerous factory."

Her grandmother was spared death from fire, but not from the factory conditions that destroyed her lungs, her sight, her hearing, and her back, the scientist said.
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« Reply #7 on: March 25, 2011, 11:19:40 pm »

The Deaths Continued

Passing laws alone isn't enough to save lives.

On Sept. 3, 1991, 25 workers died from burns or suffocation and another 54 were injured when a 25-foot-long deep-fat fryer burst into flames at the Imperial Foods Products chicken-processing plant in Hamlet, N.C. As with the Triangle fire, the fire doors were locked to keep workers from stealing chickens. The plant had never been inspected -- not by OSHA or any other federal or state safety agency -- during its 11 years in operation, North Carolina accident investigators reported.

The deaths continue today. Just look at what happened during one month last year.

On April 2, an explosion at the Tesoro petroleum refinery in Anacortes, Wash., killed seven workers. Three days later, in West Virginia, 29 miners died when Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine exploded. Fifteen days later, on April 20, 40 miles off the Louisiana coast, the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling unit exploded and killed 11 workers and injured 16 others.

These multiple-fatality tragedies garner headlines and cause politicians in Congress to bang their fists on tables, demanding action," said O'Connor.

"Our country suffers from a silent epidemic of workplace deaths that elicit little or no outrage, he said, citing the construction worker with no harness who falls to his death from an unguarded roof. Or the sanitation worker with no protection or training who enters a confined space permeated with deadly chemical fumes. And the 18–year-old kid in his first week on the job who is buried alive in a collapsed trench.

The owners of the Triangle factory were indicted by a grand jury on seven counts, charged with manslaughter in the second degree under the U.S. Labor Code, which mandated that doors should not be locked during working hours. They avoided prison with the help of New York's finest, most prestigious and highly paid lawyers, as well as a judge in their pocket, according to published reports.

To prevent his son from being charged, Emmett J. Roe, owner of Imperial Foods Products, pleaded guilty to 25 counts of involuntary manslaughter. He admitted that he had personally ordered the doors to be locked from the outside. He received a prison sentence of 19 years and 11 months.
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« Reply #8 on: March 25, 2011, 11:20:14 pm »

OSHA Has Problems Beyond Budget Cuts

Thousands are expected to gather in lower Manhattan and in other cities today to remember the tragic loss of lives caused by uncaring bosses and disinterested politicians. Many of the speeches are expected to talk about Congress's gutting of federal worker safety inspectors and the need to improve the capabilities of national programs.

"OSHA badly needs an upgrade. The penalties are too low to be a deterrent to all but the smallest employers. The criminal provisions are insulting to workers: The maximum penalty for a willful violation that kills a worker is six months, while the penalties for environmental crimes like harassing [not killing] protected animal species are five years or more," Michael Wright, director of Health, Safety and Environment for the United Steelworkers, told AOL News

Wright praises the dedication of OSHA's staff, calling them "dedicated public servants, in a tough job, trying to do more with less," and added that OSHA is significantly under-resourced as it is, so the House-proposed budget cuts would be catastrophic.

Professor David Goldsmith, a former consultant to OSHA, is an occupational and environmental epidemiologist who teaches at George Washington University's School of Public Health. He told AOL News that workers must be given much more education and training on the basics of health and safety before they enter the labor force.

"There must be a compact between workers and managers to find mutual ways to reduce on-the-job risks," he said. But Goldsmith admits that there are no incentives to reduce risk, only incentives to delay prevention by corporations and industry associations, stopping the adoption of better rules.

Dr. Michael Harbut, an occupational medicine specialist with years of working the front lines of worker safety, says OSHA has enough challenges without the budget cuts.

"OSHA can only operate within the confines of the law, and the law did not adequately contemplate the types of illnesses and deaths which can be caused by chemicals and other potentially harmful agents such as nanoparticles, which have been and will be introduced since the law was passed," Harbut, a cancer specialist, said.

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The National Park Service declared the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. a national landmark in 1991. The owners, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, may have been acquitted of criminal charges, but their notoriety has long outlived them.

Their insurance company paid $400 for each worker who died that day -- about $60,000. According to documents collected by Cornell University, Harris and Blanck doled out just $75 to each family and pocketed the rest.
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« Reply #9 on: March 25, 2011, 11:20:47 pm »

The final note to this tragic epic is that the remains of six of the workers were so badly charred their names were never known, but this year, a century later, Michael Hirsch, a historian and and amateur genealogist, tracked down the identities of the missing six.

For the first time, their names will be read with the other 140 who died that horrible day.

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/25/the-lessons-of-triangle-shirtwaist-fire-may-be-lost-100-years-la/
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« Reply #10 on: March 26, 2011, 04:11:52 pm »


Rep. John Conyers

Dean, Congressional Black Caucus
Posted: March 25, 2011 04:42 PM

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of New York City and one of the deadliest industrial accidents in the history of the United States.

This occasion has particular resonance in the present political landscape. Across this country, working men and women are under assault by the conservative agenda. We have all heard the reports from the states -- in Wisconsin, Ohio, and my home state of Michigan, the labor movement is under siege.

In the House Judiciary Committee, the Majority has introduced H.R. 10, the "Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act." The REINS Act would end federal rulemaking as we know it. House Republicans want to block even noncontroversial safety standards -- like crane and derrick construction regulations, which OSHA estimates will save 22 lives and prevent 175 injuries every year. The Majority offers this bill under the guise of "small government" and "business-friendly policy." It is as if they have learned nothing from the past.

The 146 individuals who died in the Triangle factory on March 25, 1911, represented a vibrant cross-section of the American experience. They were mostly women, mostly immigrants, some only teenagers, working hard hours in the garment district in the hopes of providing a better life for themselves and for their families.

When the fire broke out that afternoon, the stairwells were consumed by flames. The fire escape, which was never designed to support the weight of so many people and did not reach all the way to the street, collapsed. To prevent workers from stealing scraps of cloth, the owners had padlocked the back door. Fire engines reached the scene, but did not have ladders that reached the ninth floor. Many workers, faced with no escape from the blaze, leapt to their deaths on the city streets.

Tragedy soon turned to outrage. The company's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were longtime antagonists of the labor movement. Two years before the fire, when garment workers picketed the factory, Blanck and Harris hired thugs to beat their seamstresses into submission. They rejected the garment workers' demand for sprinklers and unlocked exits in the building. And although they were indicted for manslaughter because of their roles in the fire, Blanck and Harris were later acquitted -- in large part because there were no workplace safety standards on the books under which to hold them accountable.

That soon changed. In the aftermath of the fire, union ranks swelled and lawmakers responded. New York passed laws that required workplaces to have sprinkler systems, open doors, and functioning fire escapes. Other states followed suit. Over time, under constant pressure from the labor movement, workplace safety became an important priority for the federal government.

One hundred years later, we are still saddened at the senseless loss of life in the Triangle fire. We are still galvanized by the call for workers' rights in its aftermath. But I am also struck by those who refuse to learn the lessons this tragedy can teach us.

In 1911, when New York changed its fire code to require minimum standards for worker safety, business owners claimed that the new regulations were needless, useless, and would wipe out industry in the state.

We hear these complaints today. We hear about "government overreach" and "excessive regulation" from oil companies, even as their rigs explode, from bankers who have gambled and lost with the national economy, and, yes, from factory owners and other big businesses who do not see the percentage in worker safety standards.

We hear, all too much these days, about how unions are a drain on our economy. That sort of accusation could not be more off base. For more than a century, the American labor movement has fought for working conditions that are safe, decent, and fair. They did so for all Americans. They did so while building the country. Unions aren't a drain on our economy -- they are the backbone of our economy.

And finally, in Washington, we hear from the Republican leadership how all regulations are bad regulations, as if government had no role to play in improving the lives of working Americans.

The REINS Act is offered to prevent "government overreach" and "stifling regulations" that prevent businesses from doing as they please. The majority ignores the sizeable benefit to our economy from federal regulation -- the Office of Management and Budget estimates the federal rules add somewhere between $122 billion and $656 billion to our economy every year. It also ignores the intangible but undeniable benefits that come when Americans can enjoy clean air, clean drinking water, safe work places for our families, and safe toys for our children.

Proposals like these remind me of Blanck and Harris, the owners of the Triangle factory, who two years after the fire were caught once again locking the doors to their factory. Blanck was fined $20. It seems he learned little from the tragedy.

One hundred years after the fire, workers still deserve a safe workplace, and government still has a role in helping our working men and women secure that safety. Those who ignore that lesson threaten to roll back a century of progress.

Marking the 100th Anniversary of the Triangle Factory Fire
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« Reply #11 on: March 27, 2011, 12:56:23 am »

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Remembered In NYC (PHOTOS)



By BETH FOUHY  First Posted: 03/25/11 04:20 PM Updated: 03/25/11 04:20 PM

NEW YORK -- The centennial commemoration of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire became a rally for organized labor Friday, as hundreds marched and vowed to resist efforts to weaken unions in state capitals across the country. Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer drew loud cheers when he pledged to fight "right wing ideologues" trying to curb worker protections.

The rally in New York's Greenwich Village neighborhood took place outside the former Triangle factory building, which burned March 25, 1911. Earlier, many people hoisting signs designed to look like shirtwaist blouses and bearing the names of the dead marched from Union Square several blocks south to the 10-story building, which is now part of New York University.

The Triangle fire killed 146 people and helped to galvanize the U.S. labor movement. The victims were mostly young immigrant women, many of whom jumped to their death to escape the flames. The tragedy prompted many improvements in fire safety across the country, such as sprinkler installation and laws mandating fire drills.

Days after the fire, 100,000 mourners marched in a funeral procession through the streets of New York, while another 250,000 lined the route. Their grief built support for the right of garment workers to unionize.

Many of the victims' family members and descendants attended the ceremony Friday. Pete Doob, a laboratory worker from Columbia, Md., came to honor his great aunt, 21-year-old Violet Schechter, who died in the fire just a week before she was to be married.

"There were no regulations back then and there was no union to enforce them. With neither of those, the workers didn't have a chance," Doob said.

Speakers repeatedly criticized Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who pushed through legislation earlier this month to eliminate public workers' right to collective bargaining. The new law has been temporarily blocked by a county judge.
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Several other Republican governors, citing their states' dire money problems, have made similar efforts to weaken public employee unions, saying the pension and benefits unions have negotiated in the past are unsustainable over time.

U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who spoke at the ceremony, offered her support for unions pushing back.

"Today we honor workers in communities all across this great country protesting loudly the actions to strip them of collective bargaining – of their right to have a voice in the workplace. We applaud you," Solis said.

Schumer went further, saying Walker and others "want to drag our nation back to 1911."

"Today some on the far right want to rob workers of their hard-earned collecting bargaining rights. They want to fray the social safety net under the false pretense of fiscal austerity," he said.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was booed during his remarks. His plan to curb pensions and lay off thousands of teachers has rankled unions.

President Barack Obama, in a proclamation recognizing the 100th anniversary of the fire, urged people across the country to participate in ceremonies honoring the workers who died in unsafe conditions. "Working Americans are the backbone of our communities and power the engine of our economy," he wrote.

At the rally, Cybele Locke, a historian from New London, Conn., said she believed many workers still face unsafe conditions.

"We still have a long way to go to give workers the right to organize. I am here in support of all those people who are standing for collective bargaining," she said.

Chuck Helms, a representative of the Hudson County Labor Council of New Jersey, said he had come to the ceremony because he believed workers' rights were fading.

"I cannot let my children or my grandchildren go back to that time," Helms said. "You know we are moving back. Not just unions, middle class in general is moving back in that direction. America has got to get out and protest."

100th Anniversary Marked Of New York's Infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
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« Reply #12 on: March 27, 2011, 12:57:25 am »



NEW YORK - MARCH 25: A shirt bearing the name of a victim is held at a ceremony at the site of theTriangle Shirtwaist Factory fire March 25, 2011 in New York City. The ceremony marked the 100 year anniversary of the fire which killed 146 immigrant workers, most of them young women. Workers were locked into the factory during their shifts, preventing escape. New Yorkers watched in horror from below as workers leapt to their deaths from the windows above. Public outcry over the tragedy led to nationwide debate on workers rights and safety regulations and helped pave the way for strong workers unions. (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images)
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« Reply #13 on: March 27, 2011, 12:58:08 am »




NEW YORK - MARCH 25: A child places a flower at the site of theTriangle Shirtwaist Factory fire March 25, 2011 in New York City. The ceremony marked the 100 year anniversary of the fire which killed 146 immigrant workers, most of them young women. Workers were locked into the factory during their shifts, preventing escape. New Yorkers watched in horror from below as workers leapt to their deaths from the windows above. Public outcry over the tragedy led to nationwide debate on workers rights and safety regulations and helped pave the way for strong workers unions. (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images)
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« Reply #14 on: March 27, 2011, 12:58:47 am »



NEW YORK - MARCH 25: Actor Danny Glover (L) and another guest attend a ceremony at the site of theTriangle Shirtwaist Factory fire March 25, 2011 in New York City. The ceremony marked the 100 year anniversary of the fire which killed 146 immigrant workers, most of them young women. Workers were locked into the factory during their shifts, preventing escape. New Yorkers watched in horror from below as workers leapt to their deaths from the windows above. Public outcry over the tragedy led to nationwide debate on workers rights and safety regulations and helped pave the way for strong workers unions. (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images)
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