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The Chamber of Commerce ads are blatantly anti-worker, attacking progressives like Wisconsin Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin for her stand against Koch-funded anti-union measures, or Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who is a leading advocate for a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Then there are the ads supporting Republicans who support the Keystone XL pipeline...
http://veracitystew.com/2012/02/09/no-friend-to-workers-chamber-of-commerces-10-million-ad-buy-video/The Chamber of Commerce ads are blatantly anti-worker, attacking progressives like... more
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Class warfare is only as real as the People make it. Coalescing as a single voice we have the power to divest the Corporatists of the Ill gained position they currently hold. This is not a Patriarchy or a Monarchy – rather it is WE the People governing for the People and it happens by the People.
http://veracitystew.com/2012/02/07/2012-election-whats-it-all-about/Class warfare is only as real as the People make it. Coalescing as a single voice we... more
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There is a movement in the United States that is slowly taking shape. This movement is made up of people of every gender, color and creed. This movement was started basically by young people of a working age that are unemployed. They believed that if they follow the rules deemed by society that they would be rewarded-but in this era of selfishness- this is not the case. So this group, the 99 percent are occupying Wall Street to show the powers that be- what their selfishness and greed are doing to the common person.There is a movement in the United States that is slowly taking shape. This movement is... more
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CNN...
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The Blood and Sweat Behind Labor Day
By Kenneth Davis, Special to CNN
updated 10:56 AM EST, Fri September 2, 2011
PHOTO:
Scores of boys worked at the Breaker Pennsylvania Co. coal mine before child labor was finally outlawed in 1938.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Ken Davis: Today, labor under fire. But war for workers' rights was long, deadly struggle
There was child labor, 12-hour days, 6-day weeks, low wages, no sick days, holidays
Soldiers, militias, private armies used deadly force to break 19th-century strikes
Labor Day born in 1894, he says, but reform didn't come till FDR's fair labor laws
Editor's note: Kenneth C. Davis is the author of "Don't Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition" and "A Nation Rising." His website is www.dontknowmuch.com.
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(CNN) -- A small boy, perched on an open catwalk in a candy factory, falls to his death. No, it is not a macabre moment out of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." It is a true story told by social reformer Jane Addams, who founded Chicago's Hull House in 1889.
Addams also described little girls who refused sweets as Christmas gifts that year. "They could not bear the sight of it," Addams wrote. "We discovered that that they had worked from 7 in the morning until 9 at night, and they were exhausted."
These Dickensian scenes lasted in America from the late 19th century until 1938, when child labor was outlawed under the Fair Labor Standards Act. They are a sobering reminder of why the nation marks Labor Day.
To most Americans, the first Monday in September means a three-day weekend and the last hurrah of summer, a final outing at the shore before school begins, a family picnic.
But Labor Day was born in a time when work was no picnic. As America was moving from farms to factories in the Industrial Age, there was a long, violent, often-deadly struggle for fundamental workers' rights, a struggle that in many ways was America's "other civil war."
It was a war fought when 12-hour days and six-day weeks were routine. Wages were low; there were no sick days, pensions or holidays. There was certainly no unemployment insurance. Any attempts at organizing were met by the combined wrath of business and government. The business of America was business.
That conflict, a period in which thousands of workers died in America's unsafe and unsanitary factories and mines, and hundreds more died in riots and pitched battles over workers' rights, is the little-noted history behind this holiday.
The first American Labor Day is dated to a parade organized by unions in New York on September 5, 1882, as a celebration of "the strength and spirit of the American worker." Their goals were simple: decent wages, an eight-hour workday and the right to organize. The September date was selected to provide a respite for workers and their families midway between July Fourth and Thanksgiving Day. By all accounts, the first Labor Day was a peaceful affair that drew tens of thousands of workers and their families to the city's Union Square Park.
But the path to a national Labor Day holiday was no walk in the park. The federal Labor Day was created 12 years later, signed into law by President Grover Cleveland during his second term in 1894. It's not that Cleveland was a great friend of labor. In fact, he had just sent out troops to break a strike.
During the economic depression known as the Panic of 1893, workers for the Pullman Car Co., one of the country's largest manufacturers, walked off their jobs when Pullman tried to cut wages, fire workers and evict them from their company-owned homes. They were joined by hundreds of thousands of workers in a nationwide walkout. Facing a strike that would shut down America's railroads, Cleveland dispatched 12,000 federal troops on the premise that the strike interfered with the U.S. Mail. In the ensuing violence, at least 13 strikers were killed.
This was not the first time troops had been used against American workers. Federal soldiers, state militias and private armies, often from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, had used deadly force to break many 19th-century strikes. Some of these strikes had become pitched battles, like the Homestead strike of 1892 in Pennsylvania. There, men on both sides armed with rifles and cannons died fighting over keeping a union at a steel mill, a union that owner Andrew Carnegie and manager Henry Frick were determined to break.
After crushing the Pullman strike, Cleveland thought that granting workers a Labor Day holiday was a sop that would appease them as he sought a third term. (It didn't work; he was denied the Democratic nomination in 1896.) Politicians and labor leaders were content to keep the holiday in September, far from the growing popularity of May Day as a commemoration of the "Martyrs of Haymarket Square," a group of union leaders executed -- unjustly, it was later proved -- after Chicago's deadly Haymarket Square Riots in May 1884.
For unions, Labor Day proved a hollow victory. Most of the reforms they sought did not come about for nearly half a century. The Depression-era fair labor laws that were passed under Franklin D. Roosevelt finally set standards like the eight-hour day and an end to child labor.
This history is worth remembering on Labor Day. But at a moment when American workers are battered by high unemployment, the Great Recession, a technology revolution in the workplace and globalization, there seems to be little to celebrate.
And these economic forces are only part of the relentless pressures faced by America's work force. There is also a renewed war over labor in this country. It is being fought in battleground states including, most notably, Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey and Florida, where mostly Republican governors are wrangling with public employees over pay, pensions and more fundamental issues including the right of collective bargaining.
Their sharp anti-union rhetoric has increasingly found receptive listeners who have been convinced that "spoiled" unions and public employees -- the people who fight our fires, teach our children and pick up our garbage -- are at fault for our budgetary woes and the sorry state of the economy. The fight has been vitriolic but well short of the violence of America's "other civil war."
With that in mind, it is worth recalling President Abraham Lincoln's words during the dark early days of the real Civil War. "Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed," he told Congress in December 1861. "Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration,"
Today, the first Republican president's words would count as heresy in the GOP. But they are a sharp reminder that working men and women built this country and fought its wars. And their labors are worth more than a Monday holiday or the mean-spirited contempt they now face. They deserve, as Lincoln said, "the higher consideration."
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Kenneth Davis.
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The Blood and Sweat Behind Labor Day
By Kenneth Davis, Special to... more
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- ( because JACK LONDON rules ! )
After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab.
A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out.
more at LINK - - -
http://dawn.thot.net/scab.html- ( because JACK LONDON rules ! )
After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,... more
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I was thinking of leaving Sprint (Verizon) after 10 years. Buckeye Bill informed me that Sprint is owned by Verizon which, as you know is anti-union and trying to steal from its workers. So, after seeing Credo mobile ads for years. I checked them out. Sprint, as far as I know still gives to the Sierra club legal defense club for me. Unless that changed and they didn't tell me. I asked two years ago when I renewed and they said yes. But the link above says Credo is non-union. Well, isn't that interesting. Now let's not throw the baby out with the bath water, they do some good. But according to the DSA labor network, ATT is a better option if you support unions and for that matter, causes.I was thinking of leaving Sprint (Verizon) after 10 years. Buckeye Bill informed me... more
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Dave Jamieson
dave.jamieson@huffingtonpost.com
Posted: 8/17/11 10:14 PM ET
WASHINGTON -- Three Pennsylvania labor leaders were detained by police Wednesday during a protest of working conditions for foreign students at a Hershey distribution center in Palmyra, Pa.
Labor activists said that the students had to pay between $3,000 and $6,000 to come to the United States on J-1 travel visas for the summer, and that after deductions for housing they’ve been earning a mere $40 to $140 in exchange for working 40-hour weeks. Stephen Boykewich, a spokesman for the National Guestworker Alliance, an advocacy group for guest workers in the U.S., said that the students were recruited in their home countries, mostly in Eastern Europe and Asia, and were offered the opportunity to visit America and improve their English.
Boykewich said that roughly 400 students were working at the plant and that the "vast majority" of them have walked out.
Workers at the facility in Palmyra package Hershey’s candies to be distributed to stores. Kirk Saville, a Hershey’s spokesman, said the foreign workers were not directly employed by the candy giant.
“Beyond that, I can say that the Hershey Company expects all of its vendors to treat its employees fairly and equitably,” Saville said.
Saville referred The Huffington Post to Exel, Inc., the third-party logistics company that oversees the distribution center. A spokeswoman for that company said that the student workers were not directly employed by Exel, either.
“We’re not trying to pass the buck,” Exel spokeswoman Lynn Anderson said. “It’s a bit of a layered situation.”
Anderson said that although Exel does run the distribution center, in this case the company had contracted a temporary worker company, which had in turn supplied the foreign workers to Exel.
She added that the guest workers wound up at the Hershey plant to supplement the full-time staff during a busy summer season.
“We require a lot of extra workers for a short period of time, and we use temporary labor for that,” Anderson said. As for any alleged exploitation at the plant, she said “we absolutely have standards and expectations” for our contractors. “If our supplier isn’t meeting our expectations, then we’ll take the necessary steps.”
Anderson directed The Huffington Post to SHS Staffing Solutions, the temp company that she said supplied the workers. But Sean Connolly, an SHS spokesman, said that while SHS did handle their payroll, the workers were actually supplied by a different agency.
“We just handle the payroll,” Connolly said.
He referred any questions about the foreign workers’ employment to the Council for Educational Travel USA (CETUSA), which he said supplied the workers to SHS.
On its website, CETUSA calls itself a “global exchange organization dedicated to helping people from different cultures develop more compassion and understanding for one another.” The nonprofit also says on its website that it helps foreign students obtain J-1 visas. Such visas are typically issued to foreigners interested in cultural exchange or business training in the U.S.
CETUSA officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
According to Boykewich, those arrested outside the Palmyra plant were Rick Bloomingdale, AFL-CIO Pennsylvania state president; Neal Bisno, an SEIU official; and Kathy Jellison, president of SEIU Local 668. The protesters had allegedly disrupted work at the facility.
"It's an entire labor strategy," Boykewich said of putting foreign students to work at facilities like the one in Palmyra. "Companies get extraordinarily productive workers for a fraction of what they used to pay."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/17/student-guestworkers-at-hershey-plant_n_930014.htmlDave Jamieson
dave.jamieson@huffingtonpost.com
Posted: 8/17/11 10:14 PM ET... more
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In the early 20th Century---coal mine operators had become so blatantly abusive and exploitive that they were even doing things like hiring private armies of mercenary thugs to intimidate labor organizers. In several cases they even murdered people indiscriminately in areas where labor organizing activities were taking place. This is when the word "thug" came into common use, after a group in India that murdered people by strangulation----paid assassins.
-------" Throughout the early 20th century, West Virginia coal miners attempted to overthrow this brutal system and engaged in a series of strikes, such as the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike of 1912, and which coal operators attempted to stop through violent means. Mining families lived under the terror of Baldwin-Felts detective agents who were professional strikebreakers under the hire of coal operators. During that dispute agents drove a heavily armored train through a tent colony at night, opening fire on women, men and children with a machine gun.[8] They would repeat this type of tactic during the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado the next year, with even more disastrous results.[9]"--------
Blair Mountain is the site of the largest armed conflict in the United States outside of the Civil War. As many as 130 people were killed in battle with Logan County sheriff's deputies and paid strike breakers from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency.
Now, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, in moves that only highlights its well known and well paid position of bought and paid for by wealthy industrial interests-----not only wants to destroy the environment which they are supposed to be protecting, they also want to destroy our history as well by allowing the mountain top removal mining of Blair Mountain. Destroy the environment, destroy the people who have to work in the mines(WVDEP allowed violations that led to the deaths of 29 miners last year at a Massey Energy mine----and countless others)-----and now, they want to destroy our history as well. By erasing the memory of miners who gave their lives trying to make better working conditions.
Tom Clark---the director of WVDEP called the efforts to end the mountain top mining destruction of Blair Mountain---and preserve the site of one of the most significant pieces of the history of the the United States---"frivolous".
I suspect he calls anything that doesn't show a profit and put money in his pocket frivolous.
Please lend your support to stopping the destruction of Blair Mountain---and lets do what we can to preserve this site of an important piece of US history as a national park. Send letters to your congressmen and let it be known that you don't want our environment, our history and a piece of who we are destroyed to the profit of a few industrialists.In the early 20th Century---coal mine operators had become so blatantly abusive and... more
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Wetdog
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We're taking a look at some of the most popular stories from the Current community, and we've rounded up some highlights from to share. Check them out and add your two cents:
Anthony Weiner's Leaked X-Rated Photo Adds Pressure for ResignationSubmitted by letsliveinpeace
After an X-rated photo of Rep. Weiner surfaced online, some senior Democrats are calling for his resignation.
"This picture puts it over the limit," former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell told MSNBC of the explicit image that appeared online. "He has no choice but to resign."
AFL-CIO's Trumka Calls for Labor Movement Separate from Parties: 'I've Had a Snootful of This Shit!' | Common DreamsSubmitted by kennymotown
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has called for a labor movement that is separate from both political parties.
“We want an independent labor movement strong enough to return balance to our economy, fairness to our tax system, security to our families and moral and economic standing to our nation,” declared Trumka, who in recent months has been repositioning the AFL-CIO as a force that will hold Republicans and Democrats to what he describes as “a simple standard: “Are they helping or hurting working families?”
GOP Politician Tells Students "Go Back Home" After They Protest Rising TuitionSubmitted by lmzadi
A Republican lawmaker told Iowa students to go home during a state senate committee hearing on the state's budgets. The students were protesting increases in tuition costs.
State Senator Shawn Hamerlinck listened to to the students describe how their tuitions were being affected by budget cuts. He then let the students know exactly how he felt about their appearance at the meeting.
"I do not like it when students actually come here and lobby me for funds. That's just my opinion. I want to wish you guys the best. I want you to go home and graduate. But this political fear, leave the circus to us, OK?" Hamerlinck stated, according to the Des Moines Register.
Join the discussion -- or head over to the News group for more popular stories from the community.We're taking a look at some of the most popular stories from the Current... more
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The story of the Battle of Blair Mountain starts in the southern coal camps of West Virginia, a time when King Coal reigned supreme, openly and without apology.
Mining companies owned workers' homes; they owned the schools, the air and water; they owned the police and even private armies. They owned miners' lives.
Which is why murder seemed permissible. When a notorious strikebreaker shot down labor hero Sheriff Sid Hatfield, who refused to be bought by the coal companies, more than 10,000 enraged miners and pro-union forces rose up in Mingo and Logan Counties and converged on Blair Mountain. A private army of management mercenaries shot guns and dropped leftover bombs from WWI—it was the nation's largest armed conflict since the Civil War and the largest labor confrontation ever.
Don't know about the Battle of Blair Mountain? There's a reason for that. West Virginia—a state still dominated by the coal industry and its political interests— has resisted highlighting the battle in history books and has denied commemoration attempts. When the federal National Register of Historic places chose the historic site for protection, the state—working with coal company lawyers—contested the decision. The site was de-listed last year, when West Virginia state officials submitted a "revised" list of 57 landowners supposedly objecting to the historic preservation decision. The list even included 2 dead people.
This Battle of Blair Mountain continues today. Coal companies stand literally to erase this history by obliterating the mountain.
Massey Energy and Arch Coal hold several permits in various stages to mine this land in the very worse form of strip mining on this planet: Mountaintop removal mining (MTR). One active mountaintop removal site is already blasting away the mountain and is moving within a few hundred yards of the historic battle site. Massey Energy, of course, is the company responsible for killing 29 of its workers last April in the Upper Big Branch mine explosion. Since then, it has come under extreme fire for its tens of thousands of violations of safety law and its corporate culture of profits before people. Not to mention, by Massey's own records, they've had 67,000 violations of just one of the environmental statute. It's influence among West Virginia politicians, of course, is far-reaching.
All across Appalachia today, mountaintop removal mining is destroying mountain communities by ripping apart its landscape, environment, health, heritage and economic prospects. Mining companies come in, break the law, reap profits, and leave a wasteland. In MTR regions in W. Va, companies are exploding dynamite the power of a Hiroshima-sized bomb—every single week. This form of mining isn't good for jobs either. Ripping up the mountain rather than carefully extracting coal is "efficient" -- i.e. it replaces people with machines to enhance company profits. As is noted in the wonderful documentary The Last Mountain, which is being released this week, while Appalachian coal company profits and production have skyrocketed in recent decades, at the same time some 40,000 mining jobs have been lost.
This is a new "Battle of Blair Mountain" taking place today --- and raising national awareness about this amazing story could help pressure an agency that hardly ever received much attention to reconsider its decision. This victory would be a huge symbolic win for the Appalachian communities, and for the organized labor movement around the country, which is again under siege today.
contThe story of the Battle of Blair Mountain starts in the southern coal camps of West... more
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Republicans are waging a cost-cutting campaign in various states and have targeted taxpayer-funded benefits. Democrats, however, are reluctant to give up too much in negotiations over public pensions because of labor's influence in California politics.
Reporting from Sacramento -- Government pensions are being scaled back across the nation, but labor unions in California are struggling to fortify the state's position as a bulwark for generous retirement benefits.
Those seeking to dismantle the state's current system say taxpayers, who foot part of the bill, simply can't afford it. But the battle is as much about politics as finances.
Some labor leaders have said they'd sooner see state budget negotiations unravel than give way on pensions for their members. GOP lawmakers, who are leading the charge for a pension overhaul in Sacramento, say they are prepared to let that happen.
They concede, when pressed, that adjusting pensions now won't provide substantial savings to the state for years to come and would do little to ease the current budget crisis. It would, however, dilute the influence of labor in California politics.
The GOP push in California is part of a "national Republican strategy that goes beyond simply fixing the problems as we know them," said Art Pulaski, executive director of the California Labor Federation.Republicans are waging a cost-cutting campaign in various states and have targeted... more
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Officials aim to contract work out to curb future pension obligations and eventually close a budget gap. A union leader says the city didn't try to negotiate other options. Workers are shell-shocked, and one dies in an apparent suicide.
Costa Mesa has sent layoff notices to nearly half of its employees in a dramatic austerity program being closely watched by other cities struggling with ballooning pension obligations.
The move was sharply criticized by union leaders, and it stunned city employees, one of whom apparently committed suicide by jumping off Costa Mesa City Hall hours after layoff notices went out Thursday.
City officials said the cuts were the first step in a plan to outsource many services to the private sector and significantly reduce the number of workers at City Hall.
The six-month termination notices affect 213 of the city's 472 full-time employees and cut across departments: firefighters, maintenance workers, jail staff, even dogcatchers.
Costa Mesa is among hundreds of local governments around the country facing massive future shortfalls in what they owe retirees. This year's tab — $15 million out of the city's $93-million budget — is estimated to grow to more than $25 million within five years.
But while other cities have attacked the problem with less generous pensions for new hires and by requiring current employees to contribute more of their paychecks toward retirement, Costa Mesa aims to contract out services it has directly provided for decades in a bid to curb future pension obligations.
"Clearly they are trying a new model," said Stuart Drown, executive director of the Little Hoover Commission, a bipartisan state public policy oversight agency. "A city that lays off half its staff — by any standard that's got to be considered a big move."Officials aim to contract work out to curb future pension obligations and eventually... more
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Ohio lawmakers are making headlines with a much-discussed bill challenging labor unions, but Think Progress has uncovered an antigay section of the bill defining marriage as being between a man and a woman.
From Sec. 3101.01 of the bill, via Towleroad.com: “A marriage may only be entered into by one man and one woman. Any marriage between persons of the same sex is against the strong public policy of this state. Any marriage between persons of the same sex shall have no legal force or effect in this state and, if attempted to be entered into in this state, is void ab initio and shall not be recognized by this state. The recognition or extension by the state of the specific statutory benefits of a legal marriage to non-marital relationships between persons of the same sex or different sexes is against the strong public policy of this state. Any public act, record or judicial proceeding of this state, as defined in section 9.82 of the Revised Code, that extends the specific statutory benefits of legal marriage to non-marital relationships between persons of the same sex or different sexes is void.”
Ohio has already banned marriage equality, which Think Progress’ Zaid Jilani says makes this language “either redundant and spiteful or aimed at preventing the recognition of equal benefits to same-sex couples by means other than marriage.”Ohio lawmakers are making headlines with a much-discussed bill challenging labor... more
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I was here, my brothers and I traveled from Peoria, Il to partake and document this historical event. current! more is to come!I was here, my brothers and I traveled from Peoria, Il to partake and document this... more
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zack
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12 months ago
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Newstalgia is getting into a "History of Labor" mode this week. Starting up with Samuel Gompers founder of the AF of L from an address in 1916. Check it out, read more about it and find out about the labor movement in America and why it's around.Newstalgia is getting into a "History of Labor" mode this week. Starting up... more
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The following is an editorial by kennymotown:
I was not even alive the last time America was awakened from a sleeping slumber. That time was December 7th 1941, and it is said that a Japanese Admiral who had just pulled of the biggest surprise attack on America told his first officer on the bridge of an aircraft carrier he believed he had just awoke a sleeping giant. He was right, and 4 years of an all out American effort we rose to destroy Fascism in Europe and Imperialism in the Pacific.
The cost was extraordinary in terms of lives lost, and treasure.
Now we have another enemy to defeat and that enemy reared it's ugly head over the last couples weeks in the form of a planned surprise attack on the American worker. As we have found out in many articles supplied to us on Current this week the attack is directed at Unions and their ability to collective Bargaining. Most Americans were not aware of Labors big battles in the past that have basically given workers weekends, medical benefits, paid vacations, safe work places and a 40 hour week. Fortunately for us all that have to work for a living, have the means these days to look up such facts on the internet. Hundreds of workers were killed creating the ability to negotiate for fair wages and benefits, and now the attack is coming from the right again thinking that the wealthy of this country just don't have enough yet.
During the last couple of years we have seen what deregulation has done to the country or should I say to those of us that have to work for a living. It seems as the financial sector, Bankers, Investment firms, and other financial services are doing quite fine with the PUBLIC bailout money we loaned them, but the average working stiff has had the carpet pulled right out from under them. Now the Elite have decided to attack what Union jobs are left, to line their pockets with even more cash. I feel it, I know you do the rising of the American citizenry, with the out pouring of protesters in Wisconsin, and Ohio. A sleeping GIANT the American people more united than I have seen them before finally standing up and saying "Hell no"!The following is an editorial by kennymotown:
I was not even alive the last time... more
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Photo: From left, Max Florin, Fannie Rosen, Dora Evans and Josephine Cammarata were among the final six unidentified victims of the Triangle Waist Company factory fire of 1911, which killed 146 and influenced building codes, labor laws and politics in the years that followed.
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The New York Times
February 20, 2011
100 Years Later, the Roll of the Dead in a Factory Fire Is Complete
By JOSEPH BERGER
PART ONE…
In the Cemetery of the Evergreens on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, there is a haunting stone monument to the garment workers who died in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 but were never identified. It contains the bas-relief figure of a kneeling woman, her head bowed, seemingly mourning not only the deaths, but also the fact that those buried below were so badly charred that relatives could not recognize them.
Almost a century after the fire, the five women and one man, all buried in coffins under the Evergreens monument, remained unknown to the public at large, though relatives and descendants knew that a loved one had never returned from the burning blouse factory.
Now those six have been identified, largely through the persistence of a researcher, Michael Hirsch, who became obsessed with learning all he could about the victims after he discovered that one of those killed, Lizzie Adler, a 24-year-old greenhorn from Romania, had lived on his block in the East Village.
And so, for the first time, at the centennial commemoration of the fire on March 25 outside the building in Greenwich Village where the Triangle Waist Company occupied the eighth, ninth and 10th floors, the names of all 146 dead will finally be read.
The fire was a wrenching event in New York’s history, one that had a profound influence on building codes, labor laws, politics and the beginning of the New Deal two decades later.
Among the most anguishing aspects was the memory of the more than 50 young immigrant women and men who were forced to leap from the high floors to escape the inferno. However, many of the 146 victims — 129 women and 17 men — burned to death in the loft building, at Washington Place and Greene Street, and had no telltale jewelry or clothing to help identify them.
The day the six unidentified victims were buried was the culmination of the city’s outpouring of grief; hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers turned out in a driving rain for a symbolic funeral procession sponsored by labor unions and other organizations, while hundreds of thousands more watched from the sidewalks.
A century later, names and even circumstances have finally been attached to those “unknowns.”
“We consider his list to be the best ever produced on the question,” said Curtis Lyons, director of the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University, which holds one of the most thorough repositories about the Triangle fire.
Workers United, the garment workers’ union, and David Von Drehle, who wrote “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America,” a 2003 history of the fire, said they also regarded Mr. Hirsch’s list as the most authoritative.
Descendants of those who perished, like a great-granddaughter of one 33-year-old victim, Maria Lauletti, were heartened by the news, though no one interviewed had yet made a decision whether to exhume bodies from the Evergreens cemetery and attempt a DNA match.
“It means that there’s recognition that she actually died in the fire,” said Mary Ann Lauletti Hacker, 57, of Fountain Hills, Ariz. “To me, that’s a finality. She positively can be part of the record of those who died.”
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.
CONTINUED…Photo: From left, Max Florin, Fannie Rosen, Dora Evans and Josephine Cammarata were... more
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