This had escaped me, but next month marks the 100th anniversary of the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, a sweatshop in New York City. On March 25, 1911, a ninth-floor fire killed 146 garment workers in 18 minutes. Most of them were immigrants from Russia, Eastern Europe, Italy; most were women. Six of them were finally identified only last week.
The International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) had tried to organize the sweatshop, and had recruited a few of its 500 workers as members. But, for the most part, the Triangle Shirtwaist victims were poor and utterly powerless to make demands of their employers. Demands like, a working fire escape, or not being locked in the building.
The fire is credited with a number of reforms in New York State, which then filtered through manufacturing in the rest of the country. But Triangle Shirtwaist's owners were acquitted of criminal charges, and ended up settling a number of civil suits for $75 per victim. And, "In August of 1913, [co-owner] Max Blanck was charged with locking one of the doors of his factory during working hours. Brought to court, he was fined twenty dollars, and the judge apologized to him for the imposition." I think that if 146 people died horribly at a business I owned, I would probably revisit some things, but not these guys, apparently.
It would be nice if this were just bad, ancient history. But as I write this, people in all 50 states are demonstrating in support of the public workers in Wisconsin, who for the last two weeks have been protesting a bill that would basically destroy their unions. The governor and his Republican supporters are casting it as a budget-cutting measure (though he can propose $117 million in business tax cuts, which would contribute to a budget deficit in the next fiscal year, and that's totally fine).
There should be incentives to attract talented people to work in the public sector, like the people who teach your children - and trust me, a competitive salary isn't currently one of them - so employers that can't pay high salaries compensate with other benefits. But, in a time where millions of private-sector Americans are out of work and state revenues are lower, it's also appropriate to ask state employees to tighten their belts.
But the thing is - they ARE. (As if teachers and firefighters and cops all live and work in palaces, but whatever.) The public-employee unions in Wisconsin have already said that they are willing to compromise on benefit cuts as long as they can preserve their right to collective bargaining (which is kind of a union's reason for being). So when the governor digs in his heels and insists that he's going to unilaterally take away their rights, and he won't even discuss otherwise, it's hard to know where he's coming from.
This is NOT about balancing a budget. This is about twisting an economic crisis to push through something that the powers-that-be have been trying to do for more than a century: destroy unions altogether. And the fact that so many business owners want to prevent their workers from protecting their own rights is proof that we still need unions. Because these people are not going to do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
For the record, I don't belong to a union and I enjoy living in a right-to-work state where I can't be forced to join one as a condition for getting a job. I'm also the great-granddaughter of a man who was blackballed for taking part in a miner's strike in the 1930s - blackballed not just from a job in the mines, but from anywhere in town. So much for his right to free enterprise.
I'm also deeply fortunate to work in a place where employees at all levels can be heard and where the grievance procedures aren't just written in a hand-book, but observed. Most Americans aren't that fortunate.
I don't think unions are blameless or immune from the very abuses of power they're supposed to protect their workers from. But I'd rather live and work in a world where authority is collective, as opposed to one where I'm at risk of frakking death if I'm unlucky enough to work for the wrong person.
Also, business people? I need you to explain something to me. That nice place where I work, where everyone is taken seriously and has a voice in choosing our benefits package or drafting the budget - there's very little employee turnover. Seriously, I'd say that the majority of people I encounter have been there more than five years. They're invested its success. They also have institutional knowledge, which saves us time and money that we could be wasting on reinventing the wheel.
So, my question for the for-profit sector is... why don't y'all get this? I mean, go back and look at Henry Ford. The man may have had serious personal issues, but he was smart enough to know that if he paid his workers well, not only would they stick around, but they would be a market for his product. Or look at one of my uncles, who several years ago was offered a bonus, which he insisted be given to the people under him instead. That's leadership. That's long-term thinking.
So if the governor of Wisconsin wants to balance the budget, maybe he's the one who should take a pay cut. Nobody goes into teaching for the big bucks, so stop treating teachers and other public employees like they're free-loaders, like they're the problem. Unions are a big part of the reason we even have a middle class in this country- what's left of it.
And if you want to know what it looks like to have a totally unfettered "free" market where employees have no outlet for demanding fair and safe treatment, all you have to do is go to Manhattan and wander down to Washington Place. The building's still there, though now it's owned by NYU. Better yet, go to the Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn. Eight of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire victims are buried there.
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