Re-Learning the Lessons of the Triangle

If you're ever tempted to cut the union-busters the tiniest bit of slack, remember that not one of them would have hesitated to lock those girls in that firetrap and shrug when they leaped to their deaths rather than burn alive.

Heather at Crooks and Liars:

If you've got HBO, set your recording devices for this show if you're not going to be home Monday night. It premiers at 9pm eastern time March 21st. Laura Clawson did a very good write up on this at Daily KOS -- Triangle: Remembering the Fire:

This is the week of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle fire, and tomorrow (Monday) night at 9:00, HBO is airing a new documentary. Triangle: Remembering the Fire is relatively brief, but it adds a great deal to the sketch, on several levels.

The documentary first places the Triangle fire in context: Less than two years earlier, garment workers had gone on strike in the Uprising of 20,000, making outrageous demands like a 52-hour work week and overtime pay.

I am particularly intrigued by this incident during the 1909 strike:

Soon after, police officers began arresting strikers, and judges fined them and sentenced some to labor camps. One judge, while sentencing a picketer for “incitement,” explained, “You are striking against God and Nature, whose law is that man shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. You are on strike against God!”

Recently, a dozen protesters in downtown Frankfort chanted and held up signs supporting union workers. Some passers-by honked their car horns or gave thumbs-up, but only one showed hostility by yelling:

"You should thank god for what you have!"

Ten thousand years of owners exploiting labor condensed to a single ignorant sentence. After all this time, after everything workers have achieved, the bosses are still using - and succeeding with - the same old threat:

Obey your masters, who are god's representatives here on earth, and accept all your suffering silently and gratefully, and you will be rewarded in heaven. Disobey, demand more than your just pittance, and you will burn in eternal hellfire for your presumption.

Heather:

We don't teach this history in our schools, so I'm glad to see HBO doing this sort of documentary. It's important that we understand what it took to get so many of the things we take for granted right now and now easily we could go back to these days if we don't understand that the ultra-rich basically consider most of us a commodity that's expendable. And before you read the excerpt from the book below, a warning that some of it is not safe for work due to a few curse words. It's pages 186-191 of the book and recounts the incident at Triangle and the other strikes and the lifestyles of the Robber Barons around the time of the fire at the Triangle factory.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The rich are using the same playbook now that they did back in the early 1900's. Control the press so you propagandize the public, go after public education, use religious leaders to help your cause and trash unions.

Read the whole horrifying thing and try to tell yourself that if it were up to the Kochs, and governors like Walker/Kasich/Corbett/Snyder/Scott, and a sheriff like Joe Arpaio, the Ludlow massacre couldn't happen today.