Why No Fire This Time?: From the Mass Strike to No Strike

A flower-filled carriage passes through a crowd of mourners after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911.

International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University

Economists tell us that the United States finally emerged from its worst decline since the Great Depression in June 2009, although evidence of that seems scarce. Unemployment was still at 9.5 percent a year later, and at 16.5 percent by the Labor Department's more comprehensive measure. Long-term unemployment was at an historic high, and poverty was rising again after declines during the boom of the 1990s: just between 2004 and 2007, more than 30 percent of Americans were poor at least once. Since official measures understate poverty and these figures do not include the Great Recession that began in December 2007, the situation was surely worse.

By 2008, 40 percent of the forty million poor Americans were very poor, getting by with incomes below half the poverty line, which was then $17,600 per year for a family of three. According to a new Economic Security Index, one in five Americans saw their incomes fall by 25 percent or more in 2009.¹ Personal bankruptcy claims were at their highest since the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Act was passed in 2005, and foreclosures were up 35 percent from mid-2009 to mid-2010, by which point 30 percent of homeowners owed more on their houses than they were worth, making them essentially bankrupt, too.² Homelessness hit record levels, and families with children were the fastest-growing share: their numbers were up 30 percent from 2007 to 2009. Meanwhile, "tent cities" and other makeshift encampments sprung up as echoes of the Hoovervilles of the 1920s and 1930s, and thirty-seven million Americans relied upon soup kitchens and food pantries, our modern breadlines. Conditions were worse for African-Americans, as they always are: for them, this recession was a depression.³ Simon Schama, with ominous reference to the French Revolution, wondered in the pages of the Financial Times if the world was at a "tinderbox moment," from which global economic crisis might erupt into a "social fury" that could "bring down the governance of the American republic."⁴ But for all Schama's breathlessness, and notwithstanding the occasional violent outburst, a rise in right-wing extremist organizations, and the theatrics of the Tea Party caucus, the public has seemed curiously passive compared to past periods of distress.

It is commonplace to note that the U.S. has the bloodiest labor history of any Western polity; in the first two decades of the twentieth century our strike rates were up to five times higher than in other industrialized nations, and the half-dozen years after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire count among the most violent of that long, dark epoch.⁵ The years before and after the fire were host to a kaleidoscopic array of activism: farmers agitating for regulation of the railroads; city-dwellers fighting for clean water and unspoilt milk, or for parks and playgrounds and street lights; women—black and white, North and South—joining in political, social, and cultural reform movements, from those demanding suffrage (or opposing it), to temperance crusaders, consumers' leaguers, settlement house reformers, union organizers, and anti-immigrant nativists. Businesses organized for more power and influence with government and over labor, while labor agitated for shorter days, higher wages, and safer working conditions. Those frenetic years saw great advances. From 1917 to 1920 alone, states enacted four hundred new public welfare laws: there were mothers' pensions, workers' compensation and unemployment insurance measures, housing and workplace health and safety codes, efforts at child protection, public works projects, and wage and hour laws. One in ten Americans were receiving public or private aid by the eve of the Depression.⁶ And much of this innovation can be traced to the actions of poor and working-class men and women, dissatisfied with their conditions and spurred on by desperation and indignation.

Why not now? If we have experienced the worst economic...