Women have always had a presence in labor movements, and their impact on the modern day labor systems in society cannot be understated.
Unfortunately, though, two of the largest labor events in the U.S. that women were the main focus of were both tragedies that resulted in a massive loss of life. It does make a tragic amount of sense that, in order for change to happen, it needed to result from a point of crisis.
The two events that were major tipping points in labor laws that resulted in worker protests and changes to labor laws were the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, and the case of the Radium girls.
The Triangle Shirtwaist fire occurred on March 25, 1911 and resulted in the deaths of 146 factory employees. It was one of the deadliest industrial catastrophes in U.S. history. It shed light on the more egregious abusive company practices that were occurring in New York City at the time. The number of immigrants that were desperate for a job, any job, made it far too easy for malicious companies to take advantage of this and utilize abusive work practices simply because they could.
A majority of the factory employees were poor, immigrant women who had few job opportunities beyond factory work. A vast majority of the women were young, a large percentage of them teenagers that simply were unable to find safer jobs that paid fairer wages.
The factory was incredibly unsafe, using multiple methods to control their employees and enforce productivity for as long as possible. One of the most dangerous ways this was done was by locking one of the two exits of the building in order to make it more difficult for employees to leave for whatever reason. The fire escape was similarly difficult to use, being incredibly thin and narrow, and making evacuating an entire factory’s worth of employees near-impossible in case of emergency.
It was a bonafide sweatshop.
Fibers and textiles are incredibly flammable, so when the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire began, the entire building was consumed in flames with the employees trapped inside having little hopes of evacuating in time. The two youngest employees to die in the fire were both 14 years old, named Kate Leone and Rosaria Maltese.
The case of the Radium Girls was a similarly tragic one, this one involving young women and girls who were hired to paint radium (a radioactive chemical) across clock dials and military watches. The reason women and girls were hired over others was the fact that their hands were generally smaller and more suited for the delicate work that painting radium required.
Unfortunately, due to the high radioactivity of the radium, it resulted in an incredibly large number of the Radium Girls developing things like cancers, ulcers and other illnesses that reduced their lifespans by massive amounts.
Their employers had assured them that the radium was safe to work with, and the company did its best to attempt to assuage the public’s worries in regards to radium poisoning. This was, of course, a blatant lie.
It wasn’t until 1938 that one of the “Radium Girls” successfully sued the company for causing her harm due to radium poisoning. Sadly, the first woman that fell victim to radium poisoning had died in 1922, so it had been well over a decade before a lawsuit against the company had been successful.
Both of these cases are tragic examples of companies valuing profit and their own reputations over the lives of their employees. Luckily, though, at the very least they both resulted in massive amounts of change in regards to labor laws in the U.S., and the way labor disputes with employers are processed.
Women were a massive part of early labor movements in the United States. They were just, sadly, victims most of the time as large amounts of change only followed after there was a tangible body count. It’s important to remember them when thinking about the state of the labor systems in the US during the modern era, as some of our current protections can be traced back to their suffering.