From The Triangle Fire to Rana Plaza: Fast Fashion's Crushing Hand
This Earth Day, Benedetta presents two case studies from the fashion industry’s longstanding history of societal devastation.
A broken hair comb, a rosary, a fur-trimmed hat with a crushed rose. Personal belongings strewn across a crowded sidewalk, outside the spectral remains of a tall building scorched to the bone. March 26, 1911: the day after one of the worst tragedies in the history of New York, and one of the darkest, carbon monoxide-scented pages of fashion history: the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
Situated in Greenwich Village and owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the 10-storey factory specialised in producing ‘shirtwaists,’ a cheap and popular type of blouse for women, sold for as little as $3 per garment. This was one of many factories that had sprung up around the metropolis in the early 1900s, known as ‘the Gilded Age.’ The economic boom, in fact, had lured in many Italian, Greek, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian immigrants, who travelled across the Atlantic in search of the American dream, comforted by its mellifluous siren songs.
“... one of the darkest, carbon monoxide-scented pages of fashion history”
Most of the garment workers at the Shirtwaist Factory were immigrant women, some as young as fourteen years old, working eleven hours a day, six days a week to feed their families in the US and in Europe. They had to be incredibly fast and precise: 3000 stitches a minute, making no mistakes. The sewing floor had been designed by Blanck and Harris so that the workers would not get distracted and talk to one another, with only enough space for one person to pass by at a time. To the eyes of their employers, they existed only to operate the machines. Flesh and metal melting into one, heavy-lidded creature. Barely alive, barely living.
Fed up with the inhumane and perilous working conditions, and joined by other factory employees, the Triangle Shirtwaist workers finally decided to strike, initially receving little to no attention from the press — that is, until J. P. Morgan’s daughter Anne joined the movement. Then, the protests finally made it on the front pages.
Eventually, after weeks of striking and with the busy season approaching, most demands for a union were granted, and many workers returned to union-only shops. Many of them, excluding the Triangle workers. Even though they “won concessions on wages and hours,” the working conditions remained, sadly, the same.
One Saturday afternoon, as the employees were about to clock out, a dropped match on the eight floor sparked a fire, that quickly turned into an inferno they could not escape from. Blanck and Harris had a history of scorching their factories to collect insurance money; a fairly common practice at the time. Even though the Triangle fire was an accident, the tragedy that ensued was a direct consequence of the owners’ negligence and refusal to adopt and implement safety measures. No fire drills in the building, and exit doors that had been locked to prevent people from sneaking out with stolen goods.
53 workers jumped out of windows; 19 died in the elevator shaft; at least 50 burned to death on the factory floor. Almost all of the victims were women, many of them teenagers. The day after the tragedy, the sidewalks of New York were crowded by friends and family lined outside a temporary morgue to identify the bodies of their loved ones, who had not come home the day before.
Blanck and Harris were accused of manslaughter, and subsequently acquitted for lack of evidence that they did not know about the locked door (even though Blanck himself had locked it). They survived and breathed through the fire, the dust raised by hundreds of crushed dreams, and through the ashes of the women whose lives had meant so little to them.
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The Triangle Fire, however, caused a deep, festering injury in the soft tissue of the New York’s factory world. The public was understandably enraged, and the people demanded some form of justice. The outrage eventually led to 30 new laws being implemented, from minimum wage legislation to child’s labour restrictions, and also an investigation into what had actually happened at the Shirtwaist factory. And it only took 146 garment workers burning to death.
Sadly, the Triangle Fire is not the most deadly incident caused by lack of regulations and atrocious working conditions. In 2013, an eight-storey garment factory called Rana Plaza collapsed in Bangladesh. 1,134 people died and over 2,500 were injured, making it one of the worst and most deadly construction failures in history. The factory was located in a swampy area outside Dhaka, much cheaper to build on than Central Dhaka, albeit not suitable for a building that had initially been designed for commercial and not industrial use — not to mention, with heavy machineries operating on the additional top floors. The day before the tragedy, cracks had been discovered on the walls and lower floors, but nervous garment workers were soon reassured that it was completely safe for them to go back to work. No time to waste, not with the quick turnaround required by the fashion brands.
Survivors recall being trapped, lucidly looking for pens so they could write their phone numbers and addresses on their hands. An act of kindness, to make it easier for their families to identify their bodies.
Some of the (known) companies that had sourced clothing from Rana Plaza include Benetton, Mango, Primark, Matalan, Zara, Monsoon, and many others. However, it would be erroneous to think that is exclusively high-street brands whose pockets are lined with the blood and sweat of underpaid and overworked garment workers. Many luxury brands also source their garments from independent factories that they do not own, which has proven to be an incredibly dangerous system. Heftier price tags, therefore, are not necessary indicators of ethical sourcing and transparency. As Professor Micheal Posner said, “Despite the price tags for luxury brand goods, the conditions in factories across their supply chains can be just as bad as those found in factories producing for fast fashion retailers.”
The same pressure that brought down Rana Plaza should now be applied to demand transparency and accountability from governments and international fashion brands. Thankfully, movements like Fashion Revolution have already started asking the right questions, bringing these crucial issues to the general public’s attention. As consumers, we have a duty to listen, educate ourselves, and hold accountable those who refuse to disclose information on their supply chains. As if clothes can sew themselves, or are made by disembodied hands.
credits
words — benedetta mancusi
design — karina so.