In the 1800’s and early 1900’s, immigrants steadily came to the United States. Many of the immigrants of the early 1800’s were skilled craftsmen who came to this country seeking a better live. Immigration to the United States reached its peak between 1880 and 1910. The immigrants of the early 1800’s were now being replaced by less skilled immigrant workers fleeing to the United States because of hardships in their native lands. At this same time, in the United States the working population was expanding one-third faster than the total population with immigrants making up 20 percent of the work force.
With this influx of less skilled immigrants, manufacturers acquired a more inexpensive form of labor. Since immigrants were extremely poor, having escaped hardships in their own countries, they were willing to work hard at any job for longer hours and lower wages than the American workers. Many business owners took advantage of them.
In the major cities like New York, clothing manufacturers took advantage of immigrants and usually employed entire families in the manufacture of clothing. Manufacturers set up tenement workshops known as “sweatshops”. In these sweatshops immigrant workers lived and worked in the same rooms. Families would sometimes work seven days a week just to be able to pay their rent and buy a little food. Sometimes to complete jobs, families needed to take on extra immigrant workers who lived and worked with the family in the same room. This overcrowding led to unsanitary living conditions which caused diseases to spread quickly from one person to another. In addition, infant mortality rates were high. One out of every five babies born in these sweatshops died.
Those immigrants who did not work at home in the tenement workshops went to work in clothing factories that were dark, poorly ventilated, unheated, odor-filled and unsanitary. These factories were also crowded with flammable materials and machines which made fire escape routes impossible to find. In addition, employees kept doors locked to prevent workers from leaving to going to the bathroom. Because there were no safety laws at this time, employers did not follow any precautions and chose to run the factories as they saw fit. It was not until the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire that new safety regulations in factories were passed.
On March 25, 1911 at 4:30 in the afternoon, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company located on New York’s East Side caught on fire. On this day, a fire broke out on the seventh, eight, and ninth floors of this factory. Employees inside could not break through the locked steel doors inside the factory. Workers tried to escape from the fire by climbing on the fire escapes only to have the fire escapes collapse under their weight. Desperate to get out of the factory, some workers jumped out of windows to their deaths on the pavement below. Fire trucks who arrived at the scene could only reach the sixth floor of the factory with their ladders. In the end, burned and injured bodies of the workers lay everywhere. The final count of dead bodies was 146 Jewish and Italian immigrants most of whom were women.
1
