Remarks by Berry Craig at the Workers Memorial Day observance in Paducah April 26, 2008
 
"When it comes to unions and worker safety and health laws, history is an open and shut case. We need them both.

          In an ideal world, everybody would live by the Golden Rule, some form of which can be found in just about every religion. But we live in a real world where greed is the gospel of all too many employers.

          If most bosses had their way, we wouldn’t have unions or worker safety and health laws. For a long time, we didn’t have either in the United States. Not until the 1930s did Congress pass legislation giving workers the right to organize unions and requiring employers to recognize unions. Not until 1970 did Congress create the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (Many state worker safety and health laws were inadequate or were not rigorously enforced.)

          Before strong unions and meaningful protection for worker safety and health, most workers toiled long hours at low pay in jobs that threatened – and often claimed – life and limb.

          So it was at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York one early spring day in 1911.  Triangle was one of several sweatshops in the city. Most Triangle employees were women. Most were immigrants, too.

          They and other sweatshop workers had gone on strike in 1909, joining the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. Sweatshop owners stubbornly resisted the ILGW and its demands for humane working conditions. “The strike went on through the winter, against police, against scabs, against arrests and prison,” Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States.

           On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire broke out in a rag bin at Triangle. The blaze raced through the eighth, ninth and tenth floors. Fire department ladders reached no higher than the seventh floor.

          “But half of New York’s 500,000 [sweatshop] workers spent all day, perhaps twelve hours, above the seventh floor,” Zinn wrote.

          Local laws said factory doors had to open outward. That would make escape easier in case of fire. Triangle's owners ignored the laws. Factory doors opened inward, according to Zinn.

          Local laws also said that factory doors could not be locked during working hours. This, too, was to help people survive a fire. Triangle owners ignored those laws, too. They locked the doors to keep track of employees, Zinn wrote.

          “And so,” the historian added, “the young women were burned to death at their work-tables, or jammed against the locked exit door, or leaped to their deaths down the elevator shafts.”

          He quoted the New York World:

           “…Screaming men and women and boys and girls crowded out on the many window ledges and threw themselves into the streets far below. They jumped with their clothing ablaze. The hair of some of the girls streamed up aflame as they leaped.
          “Thud after thud sounded on the pavements. It is a ghastly fact that both the Greene Street and Washington Place sides of the building there grew mounds of the dead and dying…
          “From opposite windows spectators saw again and again pitiable companionships formed in the instant of death – girls who placed their arms around each other as they leaped.”

          More than 146 workers – mostly women – died in the blaze.

          The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was not an isolated incident – far from it. In the 1900s, thousands more workers were killed or maimed in accidents – most of them preventable – or were made seriously ill at work through exposure to hazardous substances employers knew or suspected were harmful.

          In 1914, according to Zinn, 35,000 workers were killed in industrial accidents and 700,000 injured. Railroads, mines and factories were slaughterhouses.

          It is because of employers like those who ran the Triangle Shirtwaist Company that unions “mourn the dead, fight for the living!” on Workers Memorial Day.

          In the 1900s, many children were among the dead. Child labor was widespread in American industry. Adults were so poorly paid that boys and girls as young as 10 had to go to work to help their parents.  Industrialists praised child labor as a godsend. 

          They claimed work taught children responsibility and kept them off the streets and out of trouble. Also, mine and factory owners saw a practical side to child labor. Children were paid less than grownups.

          Many industrialists bragged about how often they went to church. Some said God gave them their money. Christian “Captains of Industry” hated Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. But they loved Social Darwinism, a philosophy which claimed that business worked like nature.

          It was “survival of the fittest” in both, Social Darwinists said. There was nothing anybody could do – or should do -- about it, they added. Hence, Social Darwinists argued that unions and worker safety and health laws should be opposed because they interfered with the “natural operation” of the “free market.” One Social Darwinist said such laws were a waste because they only protected “those of the lowest development.”

          With Social Darwinism, millionaires didn’t have to worry about workers losing a leg, an arm, an eye or their lives on the job. Social Darwinists said workers were inferior beings; otherwise they would be millionaires. Besides, worker safety and health laws would cost the millionaire industrialists a few bucks.

          Social Darwinist millionaires had friends in high places. Mayors happily sent cops, and governors gladly dispatched National Guard troops to smash strikes and escort scabs through picket lines. In the 19th century, two presidents broke big strikes with federal troops. One -- Rutherford B. Hayes -- was a Republican, the other -- Grover Cleveland -- a Democrat. Union-busting was bipartisan in those days.

 At the same time, industrialists bought off many mayors, governors, state legislators and members of Congress of both parties. These greased politicians kept worker safety and health laws off the books or made sure they were toothless.

          While employers and their puppet politicians fought organized labor and government safety and health regulations, most of the media played cheerleader for American business and industry. Newspapers routinely smeared unions as “un-American.”

          Hence, employers like those at Triangle Shirtwaist, helped by government and a sympathetic press, ensured that a strong union movement would be a long time coming, OSHA even longer. But come they both did.
          Since 1989, unions have been observing April 28 as Workers Memorial Day because OSHA was born on that date. OSHA did much to improve worker safety and health for all workers, not just union members.

          But the latest edition of the AFL-CIO’s annual report, Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, shows that more workers are being killed on the job, but that employers who are found to have violated federal safety laws in fatality cases are paying fewer and less costly penalties.
 
 New safety laws and worker protections have ground to a halt under the administration of President George W. Bush, the report says. The report adds more to the mountain of evidence that Social Darwinism is still back with Bush. It returned full-bore with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

          When we pause this Workers Memorial Day to remember those who lost their lives on the job, let us also recall the words of the storied labor leader Mother Jones: “Mourn the dead, fight for the living!”

          In 1911, labor’s friends were few, its enemies many. So it is today, notably in the White House. Labor mourned the dead and fought for the living a century ago.

So we do today."