The Triangle Fire and They Pay The Price For Nike’s Success

1-Read The Triangle Fire first and then read They Pay The Price For Nike’s Success.

2-Now check your clothing to see where it was made. Where were the following items made? - Your shirt, your pants, your shoes, and any item of your choice.

3- If some were made overseas, why do you think manufacturers built there factories outside of the U.S..

4-What do you think would happen to the cost of these items if they were made in the U.S.?

5-Now, write a one page (200 word) persuasive article based on the following question: We’ve seen what can happen in the U.S. without safety standards. We’ve also read about modern day conditions in overseas factories. Should the U.S. allow businesses to import products produced in foreign factories that do not meet U.S. safety standards?

The Triangle Fire

Near closing time on Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Within minutes, the quiet spring afternoon erupted into madness, a terrifying moment in time, disrupting forever the lives of young workers. By the time the fire was over. 146 of the 500 employees had died. The survivors were left to live and relive those agonizing moments. The victims and their families, the people passing by who witnessed the desperate leaps from ninth floor windows, and the City of New York would never be the same. The Images of death were seared deeply in their mind’s eyes.

Many of the Triangle factory workers were women, some as young as 15 years old. They wore, for the most part, recent Italian and European Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States with their families to seek a better life. Instead, they faced lives of grinding poverty and horrifying working conditions. As recent Immigrants struggling with a new language and culture, the working poor were ready victims for the factory owners. For these workers, speaking out frequently would end with the loss of desperately needed jobs, a prospect that forced them to endure personal indignities and severe exploitation. Some turned to labor unions to speak for them; many more struggled alone. The Triangle Factory was a non-union shop although some of its workers had joined the International Ladles’ Garment Workers’ Union. New York City, with Its tenements and loft factories, had witnessed a growing concern for issues of health and safety In the early years of the twentieth century. Groups such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and the Womens’ Trade Union League (WTUL) fought for better working conditions and protective legislation. Fire inspections and precautions were woefully Inadequate at the time. The Triangle Fire tragically illustrated these inadequacies.

For all practical purposes, the ninth floor fire escape in the Asch Building led nowhere, certainly not to safety, and It bent under the weight of the factory workers trying to escape the inferno. Others waited at the windows for the rescue workers only to discover that the firefighters’ ladders were several stories too short and the water from the hoses could not reach the top floors. Many chose to jump to their deaths rather than to bum alive.

In the weeks that followed, the grieving city identified the dead, sorted out their belongings, and reeled In numbed grief at the atrocity that could have been averted with a few precautions. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union proposed an official day of mourning. The grief-stricken city gathered in churches, synagogues, and finally, in the streets.

ILGWU’s Local 25, the local to which some of the Triangle Factory workers belonged, draped its headquarters in black and set to work with the Red Cross to locate families of victims and identify needs. Protesting voices arose, bewildered and angry at the lack of concern and the greed that had made this possible. The people demanded restitution, justice, and action that would safeguard the vulnerable and oppressed.

During the next twenty years, there was a substantial effort to alleviate the most dangerous aspects of sweatshop manufacturing in New York. Government agencies, labor unions, and industry groups looked for ways to aid the victims and to facilitate lasting change. Mayor William Gaynor began a fundraising campaign for the survivors and the bereaved. Within a month of the fire the governor of New York State appointed the Factory Investigation Commission. For five years, this commission conducted a series of statewide hearings that resulted in the passage of important factory safety legislation. Frances Perkins, later to become Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, watched the Asch Building burn, an event that influenced her decision to become a lifelong advocate for workers. Frances Perkins, from her position as executive secretary of the New York Committee on Safety began an investigation. Labor and management cooperated in the ongoing work of the Joint Board of Sanitary Control to set and maintain standards of sanitation in the workplace. This board, consisting of representatives from the clothing industry and from the union, was established a year prior to the Triangle Fire in the aftermath of the 1910 Cloakmakers Strike. It conducted its own investigations and continued to inspect and monitor health and safety conditions. It set sanitary standards exceeding the legal requirements and, due to the fact that the manufacturers’ association and the union had jointly approved the standards, was able to enforce those standards in the shops that it monitored.

Eight months after the fire a jury acquitted Blanck and Harris, the factory owners, of any wrongdoing. The ILGWU, in concert with others in the labor movement and progressive organizations, would continue a long and difficult battle to achieve the right of workers to safe, decent working conditions. The event, as it faded from immediate public outrage, was not forgotten nor was it isolated in the course of the history of American workers. It did, however, point out the many serious problems facing factory workers and paved the way for attempts at remedies through protective legislation.

They pay the price for Nike’s success

Bob Herbert

THE NEW YORK TIMES

More than 90 percent of the Nike workers in Vietnam are girls or young women, age 15 to 28. Hunger follows many of them like a shadow. They work full time making the fabulous footwear that brings Nike billions, but they aren’t paid enough to eat properly, or even regularly.

Workers interviewed by Thuyen Nguyen, an American businessman who studied conditions in factories that make Nike shoes in Vietnam, said it is a matter of “simple math.”

A meal consisting of rice, a few mouthfuls of a vegetable and maybe some tofu costs the equivalent of 70 cents. Three similarly meager meals a day would cost $2.10. But the workers only make $1.60 a day. And, as Nguyen points out, they have other expenses.

Renting a room costs at least $6 a month. Clothing has to be purchased. And every now and then the workers have to buy a bar of soap and some toothpaste. To stretch the paycheck, something has to be sacrificed. Despite the persistent hunger, it’s usually food.

Nguyen’s report, released last week, said: ‘Thirty-two out of 35 workers we interviewed told us they had lost weight since working at Nike factories. All reported not feeling good generally since working at the factories. They complained of frequent headaches as well as general fatigue.” The idea that factory workers don’t make enough to eat properly is hardly a matter of concern to Nike. The company set up shop in Vietnam precisely because the wages are so low. If the workers become woozy from hunger, that’s their problem.

The beauty of the Nike formula is that the cost of the labor to make the product is next to nothing and the price at which the product sells is astonishingly high. That’s how Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods get to make their Nike millions, and Phil Knight, the shrewd and combative Nike chairman, his billions.

They thrive on the empty stomachs and other hardships of young women overseas.

The women often are treated little better than slaves. Nguyen said the factories are like “military boot camps" in which workers are subjected to various forms of humiliation and corporal punishment. Even breaks for water and visits to the bathroom are rigidly controlled. One bathroom break per eight-hour shift is allowed, and two drinks of water. That’s the maximum. Sometimes, on assembly lines that can range from 78 to 300 workers, even fewer breaks are allowed. Discomfort becomes a way of life. A worker can be hungry, thirsty and driven almost mad with the need to go to the bathroom, but she has to keep working on those shoes.

Nguyen said he believes corporal punishment is widespread. He cited several instances: supervisors hitting women over the head for poor workmanship. Workers forced to kneel with their hands in the air for up to 25 minutes. Workers having their mouths taped for talking. Workers being “sun-dried” —forced to stand in the hot sun for extended periods while writing their mistakes again and again, like schoolchildren.

There were also cases, said Nguyen, in which women were molested by supervisors.

The factories that make Nike products are by no means the only offenders, in Vietnam or elsewhere. There is no reason to believe that Nike factories are the worst offenders. But Nike has raised the exploitation of poverty stricken foreign workers to a fine and spectacularly remunerative art. Nike is the company with the advertising campaigns that are so slick, so hip and so compelling that consumers feel that, whatever the price, they must wear the product.

The company is so widely recognized it doesn’t even have to put its name in its advertising. Its ubiquitous symbol, the swoosh, is identification enough.

Because the company is so high-profile, so successful, so admired and envied, it has become, like the swoosh, a symbol. It’s the ugly multinational, buying and selling people almost at will. Nike is paying Tiger Woods a fortune, but it has also slapped its swoosh on his head, and Tiger dare not take off that cap. Nike is important because it epitomizes the triumph of monetary values over all others, and the corresponding devaluation of those peculiar interests and values we once thought of as human.