The boom of business and the creation of many factories called for a large workforce, businesses focused on getting cheap labour to make unbelievable profits. With the increase of immigrant workers willing to work at any cost, business owners set extremely low wages running from $8-10. This wage was mostly for unskilled male workers and didn’t apply to women and children, where women received one-third or one-half of the pay men received and children received even less then that. Factories themselves were crowded and littered with machinery that would cause plenty of accidents and injuries because they offered no safety precautions. Hours were long and productions were continuous and boring, two breaks were allowed for lunch and dinner but then nothing else.
Although reforms, unions, strikes, and various forms of protest came about to stop the factory conditions from worsening, not many were able to be implemented and were at times ignored. When the International Ladies Garment Workers Union led a strike in 1909 demanding higher pay and shorter hours the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory ,Blanck and Harris, were one of the few manufacturers who resisted.
In the early 19th century fires that occurred were something of sport to onlookers who waited for volunteer firefighters to come and even cheered for them when they battled fires, but along with this came problems as volunteer fire companies often competed with one another to be the first at a fire or the most efficient in putting it out, which resulted in fights and overall brawls. Fires were very common due to safety procedures in tenements and factories being ignored, many of the floors were covered in flammable items, and in the case of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, both cloth and oil were spread throughout the building and when firefighters did come the ladder could only reach up to the sixth floor and not to where the fire originated from on the ninth floor. Once the fire was put out firefighters would search through the corpses and take any valuable items they saw.
The location of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was on the corner of Greene Street & Washington Place, Manhattan, in Asch Building the 8th-10th floors
The owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory were Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. Both were notorious anti-worker policies. Their employees were paid meager wages despite working 12 hours a day, every day. Workers were crammed into the building and only received to breaks for both lunch and dinner. During this time period it was not uncommon for business owners to burn their factories in order to receive insurance claims. Both Blanck and Harris deliberately set fire to their business in order to collect on the large fire-insurance policies they had purchased, and for this reason they refused to install sprinklers and safety procedures in case they needed to burn down their shops again which was the main factor in the many deaths in the factory.
A cloth bin caught fire on March 25, 1911 in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The fire started on the 9th floor and although the manager of the floor attempted to put out the fire, the water hose was rusted and didn’t allow for water to flow. As workers rushed to get out of the building the narrow staircase allowed only few people to go down at a time and when panic ensued people were trampled to death trying to get out of the factory. The only functioning elevator carried just 12 people down at a time and soon after it stopped working. Many jumped out the window and fell 9 floors down. Others jumped down the elevator shaft although some survived most unfortunately died. Workers in groups went down the fire escape but because of the unkempt safety procedures, the fire escape, rusted, collapsed under the weight and people fell to their deaths.
Within 18 minutes, forty-nine workers burned to death or were suffocated by smoke, 36 died while jumping down the elevator shaft and 58 died from jumping to the sidewalks. Two later died from injuries. This tragedy sparked workers to form unions and set a march to take place on April 5 on New York’s Fifth Avenue to protest the conditions that had led to the fire. 80,000 people attended.