The Triangle Shirtwaist factory was a garment factory located in NYC, a city most notable for its unique textile goods. The factory produced the “shirtwaist”, a fashionable women's blouse that caught on quickly on the New York fashion scene, becoming highly demanded in the early 1900s. In order to keep up with the level of demand, owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck disregarded what sparing legislature was in place to protect the workers in factories. The factories in New York after the Second Industrial Revolution were primarily employing immigrants desperate for jobs to survive who were willing to work for lower wages in bad conditions. In the case of the textile factories, specifically the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, those employed were …show more content…
Only one of the women who jumped survived the fall. The triangle shirtwaist factory was considered a leap for factory production, largely due to the uniqueness of the factory set up. In other factories, the cutting tables, where the cloth would be cut to be later sewn, had individual scrap buckets, while the shirtwaist factory was innovative because they made the tables bins themselves by boarding up the space underneath them. This ingenious invention, however, would later lead to the fire spreading much more quickly than it would have if the fire had not been started in a three hundred pound bin of garment scraps. This fire called attention to the problems in factories during the twentieth century and prompted major reform as well as the formation and recognition of unions aiming to protect women in factories. Although tragic, the triangle fire proved to be a milestone for labor reform and the treatment of the working class as it called attention to the problems in the factories, and prompted major reform and recognition of unions, all of which improved the treatment of the working …show more content…
The most effective by far of these unions was the National Women’s Trade Union League, or the NWTUL. This was an organization founded in 1903 composed of mainly upper and middle class women that looked to work with the working class to advocate for the organization of labor. To confirm the safety of working class employees, they sent out a newspaper questionnaire about factory conditions, and got hundreds of responses. The feedback from the workers highlighted precarious and brutal conditions, and the disregard basic workers safety. The NWTUL was particularly effective in the formation of the Citizens’ Committee for Public Safety. This group was able to meet at the Metropolitan Opera House, which was attended by thousand of people, including politicians. They were able to approve legislation that formed the Bureau of Fire Prevention and granted a permanent citizens committee to pass new legislation that would protect the working class. Members of this committee Alfred Wagner and Alfred E Smith would later propose bills leading to the creation of the Factory Investigating Committee. The FIC was created in order to ensure the safety of workers in factories by making sure that the investigations into the factories themselves were honest and without corruption or other