The Triangle Fire (2 page)
Authors: William Greider,Leon Stein,Michael Hirsch
There was the sound of yelling about a fire. I tried to leave the section, but my supervisor told me to get back to work. My sister who worked on the fourth floor with me pulled me away and insisted we try to get out. We tried to go down the stairs and got to the second floor; we found the stairs had already caved in. There was a lot of yelling and confusion. In desperation, I went back up to the windows and went back and forth, looking down below. The smoke was thick and I picked the best place to jump in a pile of boxes. My sister jumped, too. She died.
Similar tragedies, large and small, are now commonplace in many developing countries where globalization has located low-wage factories that produce goods to export to wealthier nations like the United States. Six months after Kadar, eighty-four women died and dozens were severely burned in a similar toy factory fire in the burgeoning industrial zone in Shenzhen, China. Earlier, in 1991, a raincoat factory in Dongguan had burned, killing more than eighty workers. Some sixty women died at a textile factory in Fuzhou Province. There have been other instances. “Why must these tragedies repeat themselves again and again?” the
People’s Daily
in Beijing asked. The official
Economic Daily
blamed the greed and immorality of foreign investors.
Recently, I conducted a quick survey to see if these scandalous conditions had been eliminated, either by local reformers and governments or by multinational corporations insisting that their subcontractors and suppliers clean up their act. Not much has changed. In 1999, the Zhimao Electronics fire in Shenzhen left twenty-four dead and forty injured. The
China Labor Bulletin
described it as “a copycat of at least six similar fires in South China.” Nine people, including five children, died in a furniture factory in Nanyang. In Bangladesh, the largest apparel factory in Dhaka burned to the ground on a Sunday night (evidently without casualties), and firefighters reported the absence of any fire-prevention system. One recurring element in many of these cases is that the workers—usually young women imported from impoverished rural villages—are often housed in factory dormitories with security guards at the doors. When fire breaks out, the workers either cannot escape or suffocate from the smoke and toxic fumes.
There are many more examples of such abuses in the global production system, many other dimensions of the injustice visited upon the people who are workers. Like the young women in Bangkok in 1993 or in New York City in 1911, the victims lack the status and influence to defend themselves. Who will protect the working girl? Before we get too angry at the laxity of foreign governments, we should recall that similar gruesome episodes, albeit less deadly than the Kadar or Triangle tragedies, have surfaced again in the United States. In 1991, twenty-five people died when a chicken-processing plant caught fire in Hamlet, North Carolina. The exit doors were locked. In El Monte, California, inspectors discovered a garment factory where seventy-two Thai immigrants were being held in virtual peonage, working eighteen hours a day in subhuman conditions. The U.S. Government Accounting Office surveyed the nation in the mid-1990s and reported: “In general, the description of today’s sweatshops differs little from that at the turn of the century.”
The modern scandal, however, is complicated in ways that make it difficult for people to grasp. First, the abusive conditions are now scattered around the world, often in obscure places that are not visible to the public. The outrage is localized and rarely, if ever, reported by the U.S. press. Second, regulatory laws already exist and not just in the United States. Most developing countries, including China and Thailand, have sound laws that require safe working conditions and even guarantee the workers’ right to organize. These laws are widely unenforced and regularly evaded by businesses, including the subcontractors who supply major American multinationals. In the embarrassment following the toy factory fire, the Thai minister of industry ordered special inspections of 244 large factories in the Bangkok region and found that sixty percent of them had violations similar to Kadar’s.
Why does the government tolerate this? Because, even with good intentions, the laws are subverted by fierce competition among poor countries, all of whom are desperate for foreign investment and new factories that promise jobs and growth. A country like Thailand, though developing robustly for many years, is caught in the middle. If it conscientiously asserts the higher legal standards, the factories will indeed pick up and leave for China or some other very poor nation that is prepared to tolerate abuses of its own citizens in the name of economic development. Economic progress is like a treadmill that keeps workers running in place while companies profit. The Thai minister of industry candidly admitted the dilemma globalization poses for government law enforcement: “If we punish them, who will want to invest here?”
His frustrated question is not very different from what New York City officials told themselves a century ago when they contemplated the dangerous conditions in proliferating sweatshops. If we come down too hard on these factory owners, they will simply close down and move somewhere else in America—and then where will we find jobs for all of these poor immigrants? Political corruption, of course, also accompanies the retreat from principle, then and now. It is fair to say, I think, that contemporary politicians in America (and indeed many ordinary American citizens) have accepted the same passive response to economic injustices. Important people who have the power to correct the abuses are once again looking the other way.
The trouble is, the passivity of government and the public simply leads further down a low road. More injustices appear, and they, too, must be tolerated in the name of commerce. As history demonstrates, this human degradation will continue, here and abroad, until people rouse themselves to stop it. In a global system, poorer nations (even China if it wished) cannot halt exploitation on their own. The factories
do
leave one nation for another with lower standards, and there is an endless food chain of very poor countries waiting for jobs on any terms. The process will not change until international laws build a floor of reasonable standards for business performance.
This is why the global system needs new and reformed trade and investment agreements that penalize both the multinational companies and the trading nations that choose inhumane production methods to gain a competitive advantage over rivals. The economic incentives to take the low road also explain why protecting labor rights is so important for achieving genuine progress. If workers have the freedom to speak for themselves—to organize a collective voice and demand respect and a living wage—they can become a bulwark not only for advancing the society’s values and self-respect but also for raising its general standard of living. As we know from history, none of these achievements comes easily or without great effort from conscientious citizens.
In my travels, I met some of the young workers in the globalized production system, usually away from the factories in places where they could talk more honestly about their hopes and fears, ambitions and disappointments. From Indonesia and Malaysia to China and Mexico and the other countries, I always came away enthralled by their innocent struggles but also in awe of their elemental bravery. The young women and men, it is true, are often bewildered by their new circumstances as industrial workers in the complex global system. They are nevertheless trying to understand their situation. Of course, they are glad to have jobs with wage incomes, since most have migrated from poverty in rural backwaters. And, like the girls at Triangle, they are excited by their new surroundings in or near booming cities. They, too, faithfully send home money to help their impoverished families.
Yet these young workers are also rebelling against the scant pay they receive and the abusive conditions in the factories. Many of the workers I interviewed did not know what a labor union was, and some said their factory had a “union” that was organized and run by the factory managers. Yet, despite their weak position, these workers strike anyway—wildcat strikes that originate from their own angry demands for justice, much like the uprising of the garment workers in New York a century before. This is an essential point to understand about the realities of the global system. Young people in developing nations are leading thousands of such worker-led strikes, without any guidance from an organized union or other outsiders. They occur because these young people know they are being exploited (though they seldom use that word to describe their conditions). The next time you hear an economist or other experts explain that sweatshops are actually good for the poor people of the world and that any criticism of their working conditions endangers their jobs, ask about the strikes. If the workers are so grateful and happy with their situation, why do they launch so many wildcat strikes in protest? You never read much about this in the American press, but courageous workers in China even mobilize strikes, even though the penalty for the leaders can be ten or twenty years in prison.
The meaning, I believe, is quite positive for the future of the world and its gorgeous variety of people. Because the young strikers confirm that there are universal human aspirations—a thirst for personal dignity and self-advancement and just relationships—that exist across the vast boundaries of geography, race, religion, and culture. The college students and other young Americans who are mobilizing now to protest against the overseas sweatshops that manufacture products for brand-name multinationals like Nike are on the right track, because these students, after all, are the ones who buy the shoes and electronic toys that those young “working girls” are assembling in Indonesia or China or elsewhere. The American students—some of them anyway—are also beginning to recognize that social injustices are not confined to Asia or Central America; some of the same dark practices also flourish within the United States.
The students have discovered a moral question that affects their own lives: If I buy the products that afflicted workers make, do I share in the blame for what happens to those workers? This is the same question posed by the young people who died at the Triangle factory, and Americans found they could not avoid answering it.
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J
UDGE
M. L
INN
B
RUCE
(
counsel
): How high can you succesfully combat a fire now?
E
DWARD
F. C
ROKER
(
Chief, New York City Fire Department
): Not over eighty-five feet.
B
RUCE
: That would be how many stories of an ordinary building?
C
ROKER
: About seven.
B
RUCE
: Is this a serious danger?
C
ROKER
: I think if you want to go into the so-called workshops which are along Fifth Avenue and west of Broadway and east of Sixth Avenue, twelve, fourteen or fifteen story buildings they call workshops, you will find it very interesting to see the number of people in one of these buildings with absolutely not one fire protection, without any means of escape in case of fire.
—Before the New York State Assembly Investigating Committee on Corrupt Practices and Insurance Companies Other Than Life, City Hall, New York City, December 28,1910
