How 146 Deaths at the Triangle Factory Rewrote New York's Labor Laws

It was a Saturday, near the end of the shift, on March 25, 1911. On the top three floors of the Asch Building, at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street in Greenwich Village, several hundred workers at the Triangle Waist Company were folding up the day's shirtwaists, the high-collared blouses every office woman in America seemed to own. Most of the workers were young women, many of them teenagers, Jewish and Italian immigrants who lived a short walk away on the Lower East Side. Someone noticed smoke rising from a bin of cotton scraps on the eighth floor. Within about half an hour, 146 people were dead. Some burned. Some were crushed at a door that would not open. Dozens jumped from the windows because the fire department's ladders did not reach high enough, and the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk watched them fall. One of the people in that crowd was a thirty-year-old social worker who had been having tea nearby. Her name was Frances Perkins, and she is the reason this story does not end on the sidewalk.

In short: The Triangle fire killed 146 garment workers in under an hour, and the owners walked free. What changed New York was not the outrage alone but a state commission led by two machine politicians, Robert Wagner and Al Smith, with Frances Perkins as an investigator, which wrote dozens of workplace laws that later became the template for the New Deal.

The building that was called fireproof

The cruelest detail about the Asch Building is that, by the standards of 1911, it was considered safe. It was a ten-story loft with a steel frame and masonry walls, and it did not burn down. The structure survived the fire almost intact. It still stands, now part of New York University, and it is a National Historic Landmark. What burned was everything inside it: the cutting tables, the oil-soaked floors, the bins of fabric scraps, the tissue-paper patterns hung on lines above the workers' heads.

Fireproof, in other words, meant the building would be fine. Nobody had written a rule that said the people inside had to be.

The specific failures are worth laying out in order, because each one later became a line in a law. The fire escape was a single narrow iron stairway that collapsed under the weight of the people on it. The doors to one of the two stairways on the ninth floor were locked, a practice owners used to stop theft and to keep union organizers out. The doors that did open swung inward, which meant a crush of bodies could hold them shut. There had never been a fire drill. There were no sprinklers. And the ladders of the city's fire department, the best in the country, stopped around the sixth floor.

The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, escaped across the roof. They were charged with manslaughter later that year. A jury acquitted them in December 1911. Civil suits brought by the families were settled for a sum that historians usually describe as about seventy-five dollars per life.

The strike that came first

To understand why the fire hit New York the way it did, you have to rewind to the winter of 1909. That November, garment workers across the city walked out in what became known as the Uprising of the 20,000, a strike of shirtwaist makers that was led in large part by young women. Clara Lemlich, a twenty-three-year-old organizer, gave the speech at Cooper Union that tipped the meeting toward a general strike. Society women from the Women's Trade Union League joined the picket lines, and some got arrested alongside the workers, which put the strike into newspapers that would otherwise have ignored it.

Many shops settled and recognized the union. Triangle was one of the big holdouts. Its owners won a settlement that left out the demands workers cared most about, including unlocked doors and adequate fire escapes. That detail is why so many New Yorkers, in the days after the fire, did not see an accident. They saw the bill coming due for a fight the workers had already tried to win.

There is one more piece of timing that sounds invented and is not. On March 24, 1911, the day before the fire, New York's highest court decided a case called Ives v. South Buffalo Railway Co. It struck down the state's new workers' compensation law as an unconstitutional taking of the employer's property. So on the morning the Triangle workers went in for their last shift, the state's courts had just told the legislature it could not require employers to pay for workplace injuries. That is the legal ground the reformers had to build on.

Grief in the streets, and a smarter question

The city's response came in waves. There were mass meetings. There was a funeral procession on April 5, 1911, for the victims who could not be identified, and it drew enormous crowds marching in the rain. Rose Schneiderman, a union organizer who had worked in the trade herself, gave a speech at a memorial meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House that is still read in labor history classes. Her point, in paraphrase, was that working people had tried asking politely, that the public's sympathy arrived only after the bodies did, and that the only real protection workers had was to organize and protect themselves.

Here is the reframing that mattered. The first question everyone asked was who was to blame, and the answer was obvious and also useless, because the courts had just shown that blaming the owners led nowhere. The better question, the one that produced laws, was why there was no rule that would have stopped any of it. Why was a locked exit legal? Why was a fire drill optional? Why did the state not know what was happening in the thousands of lofts like this one across the city?

That shift, from punishing a villain to fixing a system, is the hinge of the whole story.

Two machine men and an investigator

In June 1911 the legislature created the Factory Investigating Commission. Its chair was Robert F. Wagner, the young Democratic leader of the state Senate. Its vice chair was Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic leader of the Assembly. Both came out of Tammany Hall, the Democratic machine that ran Manhattan politics and that reformers of the day considered the very definition of corruption. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor sat on the commission. So did members drawn from business. Frances Perkins, who had been working for the New York Consumers' League, became one of its investigators.

It would be easy to tell this as a story about good-government reformers triumphing over the machine. It is closer to the opposite. Tammany's boss, Charles F. Murphy, appears to have made a cold calculation that the voters filling the tenements were immigrants and their children, that they were furious, and that a machine which delivered for them would keep winning. Smith and Wagner were the vehicles. Reform came through the machine, not around it.

The commission did something that sounds dull and was revolutionary. It went and looked. Investigators visited factories, bakeries, canneries and tenement workshops across the state, often unannounced. Perkins later described taking legislators along so they could see for themselves: children working in canneries, women working shifts that ran through the night, exits blocked by stock, washrooms that did not exist. Smith, by her account, was changed by what he saw. The point was not simply to collect evidence. It was to make the lawmakers into witnesses.

What the laws actually said

The commission's reports led to a wave of legislation passed between 1911 and 1915, dozens of laws in all. It helps to group them, because together they invented a new idea of what the state owed people at work.

Getting out alive. Doors in factories had to open outward and could not be locked during working hours. Buildings over a certain height had to have automatic sprinklers. Fire drills became mandatory in larger workplaces. Fire escapes and stairways had to meet real standards, and smoking in factories was restricted.

Hours. In 1912 the legislature passed a law limiting the work week for women and minors in factories to fifty-four hours. Perkins lobbied for it in Albany and later told the story of how close it came to failing, which is the kind of reminder that wins usually look inevitable only afterward.

Children. Child labor rules were tightened, including in the canneries the commission had documented.

Health and sanitation. The laws set requirements for washrooms, ventilation, lighting and safe conditions in bakeries and tenement workshops.

Enforcement. This is the part people forget. In 1913 the state reorganized its labor department and gave a new Industrial Board power to write and update safety rules. A law that no one inspects is a wish. The commission understood that the real reform was a standing agency with the authority and staff to keep checking.

The courts had to be dealt with too. New York voters approved a constitutional amendment in 1913 that allowed a compulsory workers' compensation system, and the legislature passed one the next year. The Ives decision, handed down the day before the fire, had lasted less than three years.

The argument against, and why it lost

It is worth stating the opposing case fairly, because it was not stupid, and versions of it are still made in Albany and Washington today.

Manufacturers argued that New York's garment trade was ferociously competitive, with thin margins, and that every new cost would push shops out of the state or into the unregulated tenement sweatshops where nobody could inspect anything. Some argued that hours limits on women were paternalistic and would cost women jobs. The courts of the era, guided by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York striking down a bakers' hours law, had built a doctrine called freedom of contract, which held that a worker and an employer had a right to agree to any terms they liked.

The reformers' answer came in two parts. First, they showed that the freedom was a fiction: a sixteen-year-old with a family to feed did not negotiate exit doors with her employer. Second, and more practically, they wrote the rules to apply to everyone at once. If every factory in the state had to unlock its doors, no single honest owner was punished for doing the right thing. A floor under competition is not an attack on business. It decides what businesses compete on.

The garment industry did not leave New York. It stayed for decades.

From Albany to Washington

Now follow the three people across the next quarter century, because this is where a local tragedy becomes national law.

Al Smith became governor of New York and then, in 1928, the Democratic nominee for president. Robert Wagner went to the U.S. Senate and wrote the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, still known as the Wagner Act, which guaranteed most private-sector workers the right to organize and bargain collectively. He was also a key sponsor of the Social Security Act that same year.

And Frances Perkins, the woman on the sidewalk, became Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor in 1933, the first woman to serve in a president's Cabinet. She ran the committee that designed Social Security. She pushed through the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set the first national minimum wage, a maximum work week and limits on child labor. In later years she said, in effect, that the New Deal began on the day of the Triangle fire. Whatever you make of the phrasing, the lineage is plain. The ideas that a government should inspect workplaces, limit hours, bar children from factories and insure workers against injury and old age were tested in New York first, by people who had seen the bodies.

The fire is not finished

It would be comforting to call this a closed chapter. It is not. Garment factory disasters did not end in 1911; they moved to places with weaker rules, and the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh, which killed more than eleven hundred garment workers, was a reminder of where the old conditions went. Inside the United States, workplace safety still depends on inspectors, and there are far too few of them for the number of workplaces they cover. Warehouses, meatpacking plants and farms still produce injuries and deaths that safety rules were meant to prevent, and fights over heat standards for outdoor workers echo the old fights over ventilation and hours.

The lesson of the Factory Investigating Commission is not that disasters produce reform. Many disasters produce nothing. The lesson is that reform came from a specific combination: an organized workforce that had already named the problem, a public that was paying attention, politicians who saw that fixing it was good politics, and investigators who went and looked and wrote down what they saw. Take away any one of those and the fire is just a fire.

I think the most hopeful thing in this story is who did the work. Not saints. A pair of machine politicians who wanted votes, a union movement that had lost its strike, a consumers' league staffer, and a city of grieving immigrant families who refused to be told it was nobody's fault.

What you can do

• See who is organizing now. Our union election tracker lists the newest union votes the National Labor Relations Board has counted, state by state, and who won.
• Back the people organizing now. Follow and support current campaigns on our workers and unions topic page, from warehouse drives to heat-safety pushes.
• Weigh in on safety rules. When federal agencies propose workplace safety standards, the public can comment. Our list of federal rules open for comment shows what is open now and how to file.
• Ask your legislators a specific question. Find them through your representatives and ask how many workplace safety inspectors your state employs and whether that is enough.
• Visit or read about the site. If you are in New York, stand at Washington Place and Greene Street and look up to the eighth floor. It changes how the numbers feel.