This week we looked at women’s rights and worker’s rights. In the first video, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, we learned about a New York City sweatshop in the early 1900s. Employees, who were mostly young immigrant women, worked 11-12 hours. On March 25, 1911, a terrible fire broke out in the factory. There was no working hose to stop it and the fire quickly spread. There was only one fire escape but it collapsed and one working elevator in the entire building that also eventually stopped functioning. The stairs in the building led to locked doors that only opened from one side and many were trapped. Unfortunately, fire fighting technology was not advanced enough to combat the high altitudes of New York’s high buildings. The whole event spanned for eighteen minutes and resulted in 146 deaths. Eventually this led to a funeral protest march that 350,000 people attended. The owners of the building however, were not found guilty of manslaughter.
In the second video, Triangle Returns, we learn that 125 of the 146 dead from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory were young women. This led to unions forming and demanding better conditions and rights. By 1938, all sweatshops had been eliminated from the United States. Unfortunately, the rest of the world has not been able to do the same. The video tells us that on December 14, 2010, a fire broke out in Bangladesh in a sweatshop. The fire resulted in 29 dead. The families of the deceased were paid $2,080 by the company for the deaths. The workers of the factory made only 28 cents an hour, barely any more than what employees made in the triangle shirtwaist factory in 1911. The workers of the Bangladeshi factory worked 12-14 hours a day, seven days a week with one day off per month. Bangladesh is the third largest exporter to the United States. Workers have tried to protest for 35 cents an hour but were met with violence by the police. History repeats itself here.
The TIME magazine article writes about the Equal Rights Amendment. The amendment says that rights should not be denied on account of sex and that congress has the power to enforce this rule. The amendment was originally written in 1923 by Alice Paul. In the early 1900s, Paul joined demonstrations for the British suffragist movement and returned to the US using confrontational techniques she learned and used over there. In 1913, Paul and Lucy Burns formed the National Women’s Party and four years later she was imprisoned for seven months for picketing the White House. An opponent of the ERA was Phyllis Schlafly, she began a movement called STOP ERA. Schlafly argued that ERA would destroy the traditional American family and would lead to gender neutral bathrooms and women being drafted into war. Moving forward to today, the amendment has still not been passed but would impact the fight against violence towards women, pay inequality, maternity leave and abortion rights.
My classmate, Hannah Nichols posted an interesting info graphic on child labor in the era of COVID-19. I think it’s very deliberate that companies are reaching out to smaller farms and factories for the production of their products. If they can’t trace it they won’t know and be held less responsible for who is making whatever makes them money.
