Secretary of Labor Julie Su on the Worker Movement 113 Years After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

The fireplace unfold rapidly. On that Saturday in March of 1911, black smoke billowed out of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory close to Washington Sq. Park in New York Metropolis.

The panicked staff inside, many of them young immigrant women and some as young as fourteen, cried out for assist and tried to flee, however they discovered locked exit doorways and damaged hearth escapes. In order that they climbed out of the home windows and onto the ledges of the constructing, leaping to their deaths to be spared from the engulfing flames. Quickly, lots of of bystanders seemed up in horror and started listening to thud after thud of our bodies hitting the road under.

From accounts of that day, we all know {that a} younger girl on the window ledge gave a speech earlier than plunging to her dying, however with the noise and chaos of the fireplace nobody might hear what she was saying.

In all, the fireplace claimed 146 lives in 18 minutes.

Among the many bystanders was a younger girl named Frances Perkins. At this time, we all know her as the primary girl to function United States Labor Secretary—the primary girl to serve within the Cupboard of any U.S. President – and he or she is broadly thought to be essentially the most consequential chief to ever maintain the submit.

This Ladies’s Historical past Month, I’m reflecting on Frances Perkins’ legacy and the way she turned the unheard voices of these immigrant ladies right into a name to motion. Frances grew to become a driving drive behind applications that generations of Individuals have relied on for financial safety and dignity, together with a nationwide minimal wage, well being and security rules, restrictions on little one labor, and extra.

In our democracy, every technology has an obligation to take the baton of progress from those that got here earlier than us and to maintain striving for liberty and justice for all. I imagine the identical is true for staff’ rights. That’s why I hold a portrait of Frances Perkins above my desk, within the constructing named after her that’s dwelling to the Division of Labor.

Whereas our nation has come a good distance since that horrific hearth 113 years in the past, we nonetheless have a number of work to do to heed the requires justice from voices which might be too usually drowned out.

I noticed this early in my profession. In 1995, 72 Thai garment staff have been being pressured to work behind barbed wire and beneath armed guard in a suburb of Los Angeles called El Monte. These staff, who have been overwhelmingly ladies, have been trafficked to the US. They’d been lured by the promise of the American dream, solely to seek out themselves confronting injustice, simply because the Triangle manufacturing unit staff had a long time earlier.

As soon as these Thai garment staff have been found, they did the unimaginable. They fought again. I used to be privileged to be their lawyer on the time, and we filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit towards the businesses up the provision chain that the employees had been stitching for, which launched a historic campaign for company accountability.