Todays episode of the fearblog is all about business. Before I continue, let me add an asterisk that any organization is susceptible to unethical decision making, and if you're part of an organization, you should consider taking this free course. I, personally find the unethical decisions made by businesses to be of a special malice because they classically put material gains over the safety and well-being of their customers. I have frequently encountered people with a flippant attitude towards all regulation, one person even going as far to imply that fire codes were unnecessary. The reality, however, is that many of today's fire codes have their roots in a number of horrible, readily preventable tragedies that occurred as a result of attempts to cut cost or maximize profit. It is of the utmost importance that we learn these lessons from our history, so that we may not need to repeat them.
If you're squeamish, let this be your last line: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
Credit to womenshistory.about.com for these images.
Credit to nymag.com for this image.
The top three floors are where the factory and its workers were.
The Triangle Waist Company operated a clothing factory in New York City that occupied the top three floors of the ten-story Asch building. The working conditions were then what we might consider deplorable today, with workers preforming long weeks for low wages. Safety standards were equally poor, however, with all but one exit, save for the elevator, that was not locked at all times, and a poorly constructed fire escape in lieu of an additional staircase.[2] Reportedly, the reason for locking the alternate exits was so that the employer could search the employees individually for stolen materials. In addition to all of this, as workers preformed, they would dump their cotton scraps into a waste bin, and these bins were known to have contained hundreds of pounds (two month's worth) of highly flammable cotton scraps at the time of the fire. [3]
The fire is speculated to have been lit by a match or cigarette, possibly by an overheated machine, though, to my knowledge, the exact cause has never been definitively determined. Because the building had no alarm systems, not all of the factory was made aware of the fire until it had practically consumed the lower floor. The workers on the upper two floors, cut off from the stairways, were forced to either flee onto the roof, risk the fire escape (which collapsed immediately, killing a number of people) or bail from the ninth or tenth story windows onto the concrete below. The fire department was actually on scene pretty quickly, but didn't have the equipment available to effectively attack a fire so high up. In total, one-hundred forty-eight people died as a result of the fire,[4] and many more than that would've lost their lives were it not for the heroics showed by both laypersons and firemen that day.
In the aftermath of the blaze, the factory owners were indicted but, ultimately not charged, though they lost the ensuing civil suit. New York state also passed a series of laws and began inspecting factories for conditions that could lead to similar, preventable tragedies. According to the New York Times, the state ultimately found over 200 factories with conditions similar to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. [5]
America's worst maritime disaster also qualifies for this article, costing over eighteen hundred people their lives at five dollars a head. At the end of the civil war, the S.S. Sultana was commissioned to return Union troops and Union POWs who had recently been released from Confederate prison camps. The government was offering five dollars for each soldier transported up the Mississippi river, and the Sultana was offering kickbacks of a little over a dollar a head to Union Officers who were willing to overlook the fact that they were vastly overloading their ship. The ship was so overloaded that there are accounts that the top deck had to be supported by additional struts to keep from buckling. It doesn't sound like much in today's terms, but that was a pretty heft chunk of change at the time. The Sultana's capacity, according to Wikipedia, is listed at 376 passengers, plus eighty-five crew. At the time of its sinking, the ship was recorded as having 2,427 passengers (roughly six times capacity), which led to the deaths of 1800 passengers (though estimates vary from 1300 to 1900, many of the modern estimates I've heard favor the higher tallies), which puts the toll even higher than the highest estimated death tolls from the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
So why did the Sultana explode, burn, sink, and kill eighteen-hundred passengers? There are records that one of the boilers, in need of replacement, was patched instead, to avoid a potentially costly four-day delay. It has also been supposed that the boilers were not only damaged, but operated incorrectly given the ship's conditions. When the boilers did explode, they caught the ship on fire, threw a number of passengers from the ship, collapsed the smokestacks onto the crowded deck, and instantly burned many of the passengers with steam. In a time where swimming was not a common skill, newly released POWs being thrown into the wide, freezing waters of the Mississippi was little short of a death sentence. [6][7]
The last case study in this series focuses on a group of workers known as the 'radium girls'. These workers were young women, hired during the second World War to apply radioluminescent paint with a Radium-based formula. Dial-painters at the US Radium Company were encouraged to point the tips of their brushes for the sake of accurate application of the radioactive paint by 'lip-pointing' the brushes with their lips and tongue. Often, workers would come home so coated with the paint that their clothes would glow in the dark, and others, unaware of the risks, even used the paint cosmetically. At the same time, higher-level workers at the same plant were using shielding and protective gear to handle the paint, implying that the plant operators had some knowledge of the danger. The workers were first alerted to the danger when, over the course of the next few years when they began to fall ill, and some of the girls' jaws decayed outright. [8]
According to the CDC, Radium can be taken into the body through inhalation or ingestion. Radium will distribute throughout the body, but will concentrate most heavily in the bones. Of 4,835 known dial-painters, 85 are known to have developed head cancers (21) or bone sarcomas (64) over the course of their lives (three developed both). [9][10] How does that stack up against the population baseline? Well, according to cancer research UK, there's an overall incidence rate of 3.9 bone sarcoma cases per million that slightly favors men- even divided out over 50 years, that's
64 cases / 4835 workers = 0.013237 cases/worker (about one case per hundred workers). / fifty years is 0.0002647 cases per worker per year, compared to the baseline rate of 0.0000039 cases per person per year in the UK. That's an even number of decimal places out, so let's figure out how much higher above baseline the dial-painter rate for bone sarcoma only is. We can throw out the decimals and the math will essentially be the same, presuming the UK incidence rate stays constant over fifty years. 2647/39 = an incidence rate that is 67.9 times above baseline for a fifty year period.
Pretty astonishing, right? Not as astonishing as the fact that the US Radium Company actually trained these girls to tip the brushes with their lips. This led to an estimated ingestion of anywhere from "a few hundred to a few thousand microcuries of radium per year", where a maximum bodily load of radium would have been 0.1 microcurie of radium.[11] There are other allegations about US radium, but I was unable to find reliable sources for them, and thus will not air them.
Also worth mention is the battle of Blair Mountain, which was the largest armed uprising on American soil since the civil war. Workers were striking against conditions in which employment involved, among other offenses, living in a company operated town, where workers paid rent to the company and bought supplies from the company store, both of which were operated with prices well above what workers could pay.
This leads me to my other honorable mention: the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who were hired as strike-breakers by the coal companies among others, and were behind massacres at the paint creek-cabin creek strike of 1912, and the Ludlow, CO strike of 1913. When not slaughtering striking union workers, they would send detectives to otherwise harass and smoke out union members on the job site. It is worth noting that there's little evidence that the detective agency ever received any punishment for these acts, and one of the agency's founders actually went on to become a congressman.
Dear author, I can hear you saying from across the expanse of the web, this is so long ago. Surely we've come far enough that this could never occur again, that union and government intervention are redundant, you say. Well, not really. I give you a 2007 Bangladesh garment factory fire, in which over 100 workers burned to death, in part due to a lack of any emergency exits at all.[1] The factory manufactured clothing for many of our department stores, including Wal-Mart and Tesco. That's not even scratching the surface. What follows is all recent, dates should be notable in the articles.
-The Foxconn suicides http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides
-An easily preventable dust explosion kills 70, injures nearly 200 http://www.thenation.com/blog/180892/how-deaths-75-workers-chinese-factory-could-have-been-easily-prevented#
-Young men working at an iPhone 6 factory are getting leukemia http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/iphone-6-factory-china-sees-spate-cancer-deaths-1465573
-Chinese workers work themselves to death http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/young-workers-in-dongguan-chinas-factory-of-the-world-dying-of-sudden-unexplained-nocturnal-death-syndrome/story-fneuz9ev-1226998103393
-Chinese poultry factory with locked doors and blocked and/or unlit fire escapes catches fire and kills over 100 workers http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/world/asia/scores-die-in-fire-at-chinese-poultry-plant.html?_r=1
-Garment factory collapse in Bangladesh claims over 1,000 lives. The upper four floors were not constructed to code, were unpermitted, and businesses on the lower floors had closed due to the known safety hazard, while the factory demanded its workers come in. This factory produced for a number of international chains, including Wal-Mart, and this came five months after a pledge by a number of retailers to increase factory worker safety. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/world/asia/bangladesh-building-collapse.html
-If you read any, read this. Vietnamese factory workers in Russia kept in atrocious conditions, beaten regularly, not allowed to use more than 5 liters of sanitation water per 25 people, kept in windowless rooms, and put in deeper debt by factory owners garnishing wages for 'housing' and 'feeding' workers. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19197095
This list could go on for days. This simply searched four countries: Honduras, India, China, and Russia. This list also only accounts for factory conditions, generally because they're classically among the worst. What do I want? I want you to know how bad things really are out there. I want you to have a realistic view about businesses in the world today. I want you to get pissed, and go do something productive about it. Share this article with your friends, get them pissed too, and you can all go do something productive together. We can build each other up, we can be a force for good in the world, and corporations CAN be a part of that. For example, Firestone's response to the Ebola outbreak when it made it to their rubber plantation.
Please feel free to leave me any questions or comments on the blog or the facebook page.
[2]Lange, Brenda. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Infobase Publishing, 2008, page 58
[3]Stein, Leon (1962). The Triangle Fire. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8714-5.
[4]"New York Fire Kills 148: Girl Victims Leap to Death from Factory" (reprint). Chicago Sunday Tribune. March 26, 1911. p. 1. Retrieved October 3, 2007.
[5]New York Times: "Factory Firetraps Found by Hundreds," October 14, 1911,
[6]Berryman, H.E.; Potter, J.O.; Oliver, S. (1988). "The ill-fated passenger steamer Sultana: an inland maritime mass disaster of unparalleled magnitude". Journal of Forensic Sciences 33 (3): 842–850.
[7]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Sultana
[8]http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/100698sci-radium.html
[9]http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/PHS/PHS.asp?id=789&tid=154
[10]http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp144-c2.pdf
[11]http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/radioluminescent/radioluminescentinfo.htm
