Bush's OSHA: No Laws? No Crimes

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Bush's OSHA: No Laws? No Crimes
By Elizabeth de la Vega
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 08 April 2008

Ninety-seven years ago this month, just eight days after the March 25, 1911, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire , in which nearly 150 young men and women suffered horrific deaths, Rose Schneiderman rocked the Metropolitan Opera House.

She was not singing. But her voice, pellucid and sharp, carried the house:

"I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting."

Who was Rose Schneiderman? She was, in the words of Frances Perkins (who later became Franklin D. Roosevelt's labor secretary): "an unknown little girl." It was a realistic - not unkind - description of this factory worker, who earned a paltry $5.00 a week for grueling ten-hour days spent sewing linings into golf hats. To the indifferent eyes shaded by those natty caps, the Polish immigrant with a sixth-grade education was almost certainly invisible, or, at best, a curiosity to be observed on a Sunday afternoon East Side-slumming tour.

On Sunday, April 2, however, all eyes were riveted upon the 29-year-old labor organizer with "fiery red hair" who was commanding the Opera House stage.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building, it had been said, was fireproof. And so it was: The structure survived unscathed. The people inside, however, did not. The owners had cut costs by packing seamstresses and chain-smoking fabric cutters into a cramped wood space, eschewing rudimentary procedures necessary to avoid the accumulation of flammable oily rags and littered fabric. Even worse, to avoid the theft of an odd scrap of lace or ribbon, they had locked all but one door to streamline the bosses' daily inspection of pockets and handbags on the employees' way out. So, when the inevitable conflagration began, the mostly teenaged workers - for some of whom the only identifiable remains were their engagement rings (14 in all) - had no way out. They were left to roast to death or hurtle themselves to the pavement.

Suddenly humanitarians after this tragedy, the same Gilded-Age revelers who had caroused through the East Side as if it were Disneyland were moved to donate to Red Cross victims' funds.

Schneiderman was having none of it. It was much too late to offer "a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift." It was also, she reminded them:

"Not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred."

Certainly, much has improved for factory workers since 1911. But, as workers at the Imperial Sugar Co. in Port Wentworth, Georgia, could attest, life is still cheap and property is still sacred. On February 8, 2008, 12 employees there were burned to death and dozens more critically injured because Republicans are committed to making sure no pesky regulations upset that perverse calculation - regardless of the human suffering it entails. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040808R.shtml