- Person
- Rose Schneiderman
- Lived
- 1882–1972
- Field
- Labour organising
- From
- Polish-American
The story
Late on the afternoon of Saturday 25 March 1911, fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building near Washington Square in Manhattan, home of the Triangle Waist Company. The flames spread to the ninth and tenth floors. One stairway door was locked, the single fire escape collapsed, and 146 garment workers died, 123 of them women and girls, most of them young Jewish and Italian immigrants. Many were burned alive or died jumping to the pavement.
The disaster dramatised everything Rose Schneiderman and the Women's Trade Union League had been fighting. The league had already documented factories without fire escapes or with locked exit doors at dozens of sweatshops in and around New York, and twenty-five workers had died in a similar fire in Newark, New Jersey, shortly before.
On 2 April 1911 a memorial meeting was held at the Metropolitan Opera House, largely attended by the league's well-off supporters. Schneiderman refused to offer comforting words. She said she would be a traitor to the dead if she came to talk of good fellowship, and that the public had been tried and found wanting. She compared the high-powered machinery and firetrap buildings of the factories to the instruments of the Inquisition, and said that "the life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred." She ended: "I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves," through a strong working-class movement.
The anger she voiced helped push New York to act. The state legislature created a Factory Investigating Commission, chaired by Robert F. Wagner with Al Smith as co-chair, which took testimony from 222 witnesses and inspected factories across the state. Between 1911 and 1913, 60 of the 64 laws it recommended were passed, requiring better exits, fireproofing, fire extinguishers, alarms and sprinklers, and limiting the hours women and children could work.
Schneiderman stayed with the league as an organiser and later became president of its New York branch and then its national president for more than twenty years. Her speech, often remembered by its phrase "we have found you wanting", is still read today as one of the great statements of the American labour movement, and a memorial to the fire's victims was unveiled on the building in 2023 as a lasting reminder of why workplace safety laws matter.
Why it matters
Schneiderman's speech gave voice to workers' anger after the Triangle fire and helped build the pressure for factory safety reform in New York.
About Rose Schneiderman
Polish-Jewish immigrant cap-maker who became a towering labour leader, popularised the cry “bread and roses” and helped shape New Deal labour law.
More about Rose Schneiderman
- Rose Schneiderman fought for workers' bread and roses“The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too,” Rose Schneiderman declared in 1912; she spent half a century winning better wages, hours and safety for working women.
- Rose Schneiderman founded a union's first women's localIn 1903 Rose Schneiderman organised the women in her cap factory so quickly that the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers' Union chartered its first women's local within days.
- Rose Schneiderman was a founding member of the ACLURose Schneiderman was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, bringing a labour organiser's experience to the defence of free speech and civil liberties.
- Rose Schneiderman took women's labour rights worldwideRose Schneiderman was a key member of the first International Congress of Working Women in 1919, which aimed to address women's working conditions at the new International Labour Organization.
- Rose Schneiderman refused a privilege few workers hadIn 1908 Rose Schneiderman turned down a scholarship to finish her schooling, saying she could not accept a privilege so few working women had, and organised workers instead.
- Rose Schneiderman brought working women into suffrageFrom 1907 Rose Schneiderman argued that working women needed the vote to win better conditions, helping widen the suffrage movement beyond the middle class.
- Rose Schneiderman toured Ohio to win men's votes for womenIn 1912 Rose Schneiderman travelled through Ohio's industrial cities for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, urging working men to vote for women's suffrage.
- Rose Schneiderman helped win the vote for New York womenIn 1917 Rose Schneiderman led the industrial section of New York's suffrage campaign, and the state referendum that year gave New York's women full voting rights.
Sources
- Rose Schneiderman Wikipedia
- Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire Wikipedia
- Rose Schneiderman Jewish Women's Archive, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.