This week I read an Article and two short documentaries which were heartbreaking to watch. In the Youtube video “The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire” I learned that on Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the top floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. Firefighters arrived at the scene, but their ladders weren’t tall enough to reach the upper floors of the 10-story building. Trapped inside because the owners had locked the fire escape exit doors, workers jumped to their deaths. In half an hour, the fire was over, and 146 of the 500 workers mostly young women were dead. The shirtwaist makers, as young as age 15, worked seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. with a half-hour lunch break. During the busy season, the work was nearly non-stop. They were paid about $6 per week. In some cases, they were required to use their own needles, thread, irons, and occasionally their own sewing machines. The factories also were unsanitary, or as a young striker explained, “unsanitary that’s the word that is generally used, but there ought to be a worse one used.” At the Triangle factory, women had to leave the building to use the bathroom, so management began locking the steel exit doors to prevent the “interruption of work” and only the foreman had the key.
In the Youtube video, “Triangle Returns”, Charles Kernaghan discusses the “Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire” which was the deadliest industrial disaster of New York City, and the horror of the 2010 Ha-Meem factory fire in Bangladesh occurring almost 100 years after the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. In Bangladesh, workers work 12 to 14 hours a day and 7 days a week, and 1 day off a month. They live a life that we can’t even imagine. Bangladesh is the 3rd largest export to the governments to the United States. The workers would get $0.28 an hour. When workers protested, demanding just 35 cents an hour as opposed to the 28 cents per hour wage they were being paid because it was just too less, they were denied this by Walmart and other mega-corporations. The workers were beaten by the police in Bangladesh and 80% of them were young women. It feels so sad and heartbroken even nowadays those hard-working women earn $0.28 an hour.
In the article, “Virginia Just Became the 38th State to Pass the Equal Rights Amendment. I learned that on January 15, Virginia became the latest state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a proposed amendment to the Constitution that guarantees equal rights for women. The Constitution provides that amendments take effect when three-quarters of the states ratify them, putting the current threshold at 38 states.
My classmate Keven Kimble’s snapshot was very powerful to me. The snapshot was about the Rana Plaza factory which is in Bangladesh the country I came from. The factory collapsed killed 1100 innocent hard-working people. I remember I was watching TV with my whole family and we all were shocked for weeks. There was no protection for all of those hard-working people. I loved Glory Kaul wilson’s snapshot. The snapshot says “ No self-respecting woman should wish or work, for the success of a party that ignores her sex”. I completely agree with it. We need the factory to respect women’s rights and protect their privacy and safety.
