Commentary
If your sister or daughter were killed on the job because the boss didn’t care about safety, you’d do something, right? For years, I’ve been waiting for Hollywood to right an old wrong, so let’s reopen the wound and leAt it bleed anew.
America has reached one helluva low ebb if the most bearable story in Monday’s New York Times involved the deaths of 146 workers.
The Triangle Shirtwaist holocaust happened in New York on March 5, 1911, when fire broke out on the eighth floor of a Greenwich Village sweatshop. The two rich guys who owned the place had locked doors to keep the workforce of mostly young immigrant women from taking breaks.
The fire escape, which had been poorly constructed, collapsed as panicking workers tried to flee. More than 50 jumped nine stories to their deaths rather than be consumed by the flames. In addition to the 146 dead, 71 were injured. Fire crew ladders could only reach the sixth floor, well below the conflagration.
First responders charged with snuffing the embers and removing the bodies had to be regularly relieved of duty because the emotional strain became so great. All those young people, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrant girls, needlessly burned or choked to death.
They had been forced to work up to 84 hours a week for the princely sum of seven dollars. Seven. Dollars. A week. About eight cents an hour, $2.51 in 2023 money.
The Triangle disaster birthed the modern labor movement which won protections for workers, safeguards under employer attack to this day.
Triangle’s trauma finally motivated New York to mandate sprinklers in high rise buildings. Always doing too little, too late, Nevada suffered instant replay in 1980 when the Las Vegas MGM Grand caught fire.
The late great Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, introduced a bill mandating sprinklers in buildings higher than 55 feet. He could only interest a single co-sponsor, wealthy KVBC TV-3 owner Bill Hernstadt, D-Las Vegas. The measure was given no chance of passage due to opposition from the gambling industry, those poor impoverished darlings.
A few weeks later in the 1981 legislative session, the Las Vegas Hilton caught fire and many more tourists got torched. All of a sudden, everybody wanted to sign on to Neal’s bill. He politely refused.
The measure passed easily but the gambling-industrial complex would not countenance such an attack on profitability. They lobbied and finagled a skullduggerous financial deal, sticking U.S. taxpayers with paying millions to retrofit Nevada high rises.
The Golden Rule was once again obeyed: The guy with the gold makes the rules.
The two blackguards directly responsible for the 1911 mass slaughter were indicted a month later for the death of only one, Margaret Schwartz. The trial of Max Blank and Isaac Harris began eight months later. They were acquitted of responsibility on Dec. 27, 1911.
Three years later, 23 individual civil suits were settled for the princely sum of $75 per dead employee. According to U.S. Dept. of Labor statistics, $75.00 in 1913 (the oldest date available) would be worth a whopping $2,355.53 today.
The guy with the gold makes the rules.
These days, the shirt factory building is a national historic site and houses New York University’s chemistry and biology labs. Only a bronze plaque commemorated the Greenwich Village tragedy…
Until last Wednesday with the unveiling of large stainless steel plates placed on two sides of the building bearing the names and ages of the dead along with testimony of survivors and eyewitnesses. It took a decade of work by labor organizations and survivors’ descendants. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Julie Su attended and spoke.
Secretary Su noted that one of those who “looked on in horror” was Frances Perkins who became secretary of labor under President Franklin Roosevelt. The first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet, she held the office longer than anyone before or since, 1993 to 1945.
Later this year, the memorial will be completed by installation of a stainless steel ribbon reaching to the ninth floor from which so many jumped to their deaths.
Despite all this time and all the reforms — even after a New York Philharmonic oratorio, there remains one untold story, documented only here.
Many Americans remember the hit 1982-1993 “Cheers” TV series and its spinoff “Frazier.” They lasted a combined 20 years. (An updated “Frazier” returned last week on a subscription channel.)
“Cheers” won many awards, including an Emmy for the producers of its opening credits — featuring one of the Triangle sweatshop owners. WTF?
To this day, you can’t find the story anywhere save the Sparks Tribune and NevadaLabor.com/
In February 2018, I recommended that readers watch a rerun of the PBS “American Experience” documentary about the Triangle debacle, which was scheduled against President Trump’s second state of the union address.
I followed my own advice and noticed that “there was something eerily familiar about the recurring still photos of the greedy owners of that firetrap New York sweatshop. Isaac Harris looks identical to the smirky sot in the bowler hat with a drink in his hand on the Emmy-winning opening credits of the popular ‘Cheers’ TV sitcom.” (Barbwire 2-21-2018)
Don’t believe me, believe your own eyes. Scroll to the bottom of every expanded Barbwire at NevadaLabor.com since 2018 and read “$75 dead or alive: A mass murderer becomes famous on TV a century later.”
I contacted the PBS producers in Boston and their Cheers counterparts in Los Angeles. I’m still waiting for a response. The series, complete with the smirking Triangle owner, is currently available on 11 television channels.
I will keep including that tableau with every Barbwire as long as Cheers continues to glorify that smarmy mass murderer in the derby hat.
Stay safe, get vaxxed and pray for those cruelly afflicted by the cruelly small minds on this small planet, especially victims of our perpetual wars.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbáno is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com/ Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us
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