The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

this is behind the bastards. The podcast that is introduced like a piece of ship. Um, mother, don't say that. Some some could say that introducing it listen so the whole. Some could say that the producer don't come from my name. Listen. But pieces of ship are produced effortlessly. It's actually quite mad produced. They are saying that is true. Though, that is true. Your body is magical, Pint. I would like, yeah,

I wasn't calling you a piece of ship, Sophie. I was saying, my introduction was done like a piece of ship. But well, your your your your, your competence is at war with my incompetence and generally edges it out by a slight margin, but not today. Today in competence wins, which is ties into the theme of the episode. This is behind the Bastards show about bad people, the worst ones in all of history. Um, and some other stuff too.

Sometimes like today we're not talking well, we are talking about some bad people, but we're also talking about a bad thing that happened with our guest Jason Petty a k A prop what's the words? We network, but we are network buddies. You and I are now are now co workers colleagues, which I think means, if I understand corporate law, we can't be called upon to testify against one another. I wouldn't testify on you anyway. But now I'm glad that it's in. I'm glad that it's in.

It's in writing now and broken by Yeah, being on the same podcast network you want to talk about, Um, well it's not your new show, it's your old show. But but now it's on our network. Yeah, it's got a got a jetpack in it, hood politics with problem man Like, Yes, I'm so excited to bring this to the team and have y'alls like input into like how to make it as as as dope as possible. Yeah,

it's politics is gangbanging in nice suits. I think so many times in the same way that like what this pod does, which is like brings everybody to the table so that now we all have shared information agreed upon about you know, what's happening in the world and how we got there. I think it's the same with with politics. Man, I'm just look, they just speak a different language. They're

not smartyr than you. So I'm just here to not give commentary but analysis so that you know what you're looking at and that cannot by trick you into thinking that this isn't something you don't already know and understands

that that's how politics. The Joe Biden's from Long Beach episode, Oh yes, the Joe Biden's from Long Beach episode I really have enjoyed in your show is how you explain Mitch McConnell, because he really has to be explained in like ganganging terms to really get how McConnell goes like. It didn't make sense. It took me so long to put a finger on it. Then I was like, oh, you're just a hustler. Did all make sense? Mm hmm, Well we're talking about we're actually gonna talk about some

gang ship. Today, We're going to talk about some um, some horrible ship. We're gonna talk about the triangle shirtwaist fire. Have you ever heard of this prop Nope? Okay, this is uh moments, this is a good one. This is a horrible industrial disaster in the United States, so properly the idea that human beings would get their clothing almost exclusively from stores, uh, and stores that were themselves stocked by massive factories that produce clothing at scale. That's pretty new.

Didn't used to be that way for most of human history, right. Uh, your ancient Romans, you know, your your, your, your, your Macedonians, Uh, your Carthaginians, your han China, They're not not walking into a department store and buying a bunch of like identical pairs of shorts. Didn't work that way. No ancient Seers markets, No ancient Seers markets. Um. There there is a free

people buried with the Library of Alexandria. But if that's ever uncovered, a plague will will be unleashed upon the world. That will lend all of society. Um. But yeah, not not. Not a lot of mass produced clothing back in the day in fact in the United States and sevente which is not all that long ago, right, I've drinking bars

in Europe that are older than that. History's greatest monster, Alexander Hamilton's estimated that between two thirds and four fifths of all clothing in the new United States was homemade. So basically everything's people had on their bodies in the early US was something that like a family member, Yeah, Mama made it. Yeah, mama made its, sister made or whatever grandma. Um. Now, that state of affairs didn't start to change until the mid eighteen forties with the development

of the modern sewing machine. But what really shifted matters in the United States, at least was the Civil War. Because during the Civil War, right, you got you got

all these assholes wanted to keep doing a slavery. You've got these guys who are generally less assholes want to stop them, and they can script About two million men the about two million men joined the Union Army over the course of that war, and all those guys, Um, all those guys need uniforms, right, um, and two million dudes, you're not gonna hand sew all that ship, especially since half these motherfucker's are dropping dead right out of that.

You know, how about we just make thirty of them and when you die, we just take your pants, all yeah, we just take your pants. Take a share. Um yeah. So these guys uh need mass produced uniforms, and a lot of them are a lot of them are immigrants, right. That's one of the big things about the Union side a ship. Some of these guys are Irish or German because those are like where people are coming to the United States from. Um. And so most of these people

had been dirt poor for most of their lives. They had like one or two sets of clothing that they owned, and it was stuff that like their family made and maintained. Suddenly they joined the military and they get these mass produced uniforms and standardized sizes. Um. Now, and this is probably for most of them, the first mass produced clothing on their body. And today you know, you you brag that, like,

oh this this shirt's handmade. Right, My pants were like hands sown, and that's a that's a mark of higher quality than like a factory made piece of clothing. Not necessarily the case back then, right, because your clothing is often made by mom or dad or grandma or siss and they're not always good at it, you know. Yeah, people aren't good at most things. So like, yeah, that's crazy.

You know what I think about, like just how culture has just continues to evolve, like we you know, in the fifties, we had to teach America to throw stuff away, like you know, and and just the idea of recycling and stuff like that. Like I thought about the Milkman troupe and I was like, dude, you had glass bottles and a dude came to the house and refilled them. I'm like, yo, that's some like Silicon Valley like greenery fools are bragging about having their own chickens, you know,

Like that's like I got chickens, I make eggs. And I'm like, dog, this this is not a flex do you know what I'm saying? Like this is what culture was for centuries, you know. So yeah, so hearing this is like reminds me of that. Yeah, I actually never thought of that, Like my mom made this wetter. Yeah

I can tell maybe, yeah, I can see that. Um, I'm sure some of these clothes was but for a lot of these soldiers, not only was this their first mass produced clothing, but it was the highest quality clothing they'd ever worn, and it was the best fitting clothing because it had been like specifically, there were standardized sizes that were you know, it was a lot of folks kind of left the military after the Civil War with a real appreciation for manufactured clothing and a desire to

to own more of it. Um So in the eighteen seventies, the cutter's knife revolutionized the garment industry again. This was a mass produced utility knife, a kind of a box cutter's type device, razor sharp, and it allowed skilled users to cut out pieces that can then be sewn into hundreds of identical garments. So we get the sewing machine. The Civil War gives a lot of people a taste for homemade clothing than in the eighteen seventies. They had been a new kind of knife that lets you much

more quickly mass produce quality garments. By the eighteen eighties, all of the necessary technology for a clothes making revolution had been invented. The living missing was dirt, cheap, easily replaceable labor, which, if you know anything about clothing is made today, is a critical part of cheap clothes. Truly, nothing new we needed. We've got everything but suffering poor immigrants to make sense, we could find people that we don't gotta pay, that could do this all day for

good news. Right around that time, a shipload of new immigrants start coming into the United States. Now when we're talking about the garment industry, it's about a third of these people are Italian. About two thirds of them are Jews from Eastern Europe. UM. And the the Italians who come in that flood the garment industry are are from southern Italy. About one point two million of these people immigrant to the United States net in the first decade

of the nineteen hundreds UM. And then you know the remainder, about two million people are Jews from Eastern Europe, and both groups of refugees would heavily dominate the new garment industry. UM. These people were willing to work and able to work for very cheap because they were completely destitute. They were

fleeing disasters, in different kinds of disasters. In the case of the Italians, that disaster was a man made ecological tragedy that will not sound familiar to anybody listening to this podcast and will never happen again anywhere in the world, Like, for example, the place where most Americans live. So I'm gonna read a quote from a book by journalist Dave von Drell quote. The end of feudalism and of the papal states in the nineteenth century put millions of acres

of Italian land in private hands. Nearly every new owner made the same decision to cut down the trees, hoping to sell the lumber and expand the fields. The result was massive soil erosion along the hillsides of once beautiful southern provinces like Calabria, Basilicata, Apulia, and Campania. Top soil washed into the rivers, ruining the farm economy. When the silted rivers flooded in the wet winter months, they created low, stagnant pools and swamps, which and turn bread mosquitoes, which

produced epidemics of malaria. Without trees to hold the top soil, what had been a tenuously balanced ecology became a strange and deadly combination of tropical disease and desert like aridity. Conditions were worse on the island of Sicily, where within sight of the Blue Sea, the grass is a lifeless brown and the road a powder of white. In many regions it is necessary to go long distances to procure

drinking water. As one early writer on Italian immigration explained, it's a dest bowl ship that yeah yeah, um, and they're a version of what's coming for California and a sizeable chunk of Oregon like this summer. Yeah, it's it's it's on its way, guys like this. Yeah yeah. So this is why I think we've all watched Five Will Goes West, the famed documentary about Italian immigration into the United States. This is yeah, there's no cats destroying all of the trees and leading the top soil to leach

into the rivers, creating stagnant death pits. Um. So yeah. Now, obviously Italians are significant part of the growing garment industries workplace, but they were vastly outnumbered by Russian Jews. Not just well Jews from what was Russia, which included modern day Ukraine in Poland. Um. Most of these Jewish immigrants came from what was called the Pale of Settlement, which was within the Russian Empire, the limited swath of territory that

Jews were allowed to inhabit under the Czar's regime. Remember this is a there's there's there's like there's an apartheid system for Jewish people in Russia during this time. Um. One of the few jobs that Jewish people were allowed

to do during this period was garment making. And so that's part of why they came to dominate the US garment industry, is they a lot of them, men and women, learned how to sew, learned how to make garments, did that for a living, and kind of like small boutique senses of the word when they were in Russia, and then when they came to the United States, they had they had that skill right as the garment industry exploded. On Art eighteen eighty one, leftist revolutionaries in Russia killed

Czar Alexander the Second with a comically large bomb. Now we mentioned a couple of times on the show because it's important, um, but the Czar had been a reformer, He's the guy who freed the serfs, and he'd been good to Russia's Jews, although good here is a term that means he didn't actively seek their extermination. Despite the fact that Russian Jews had probably the least to gain from this Csar's death, they were instantly blamed for masterminding

the assassination. This is kind of the story of why all of these Jewish people immigrate to the United States. More than thirty cities erupted into anti Semitic violence in the wake of the Tsar's assassination. Shlomo Lambrosa, writing in Modern Judaism magazine, notes that in the wake of the Tsar's murder quote, Jews were beaten, killed, and burned out of their homes. Each attack was more brutal than the preceding mass destruction. Thousands killed, hundreds of thousands wounded, orphaned,

and rendered homeless. This was the legacy of pogroms. Now. These programs were not ordered by anyone at the head of the Russian state, but they were extremely popular. Many programs were actively sponsored and organized by local Russian police. It was not until late summer around August of eighteen eighty one that the Czar's troops took action to halt the violence, and their intervention did not achieve any lasting peace. For the next three years after the Czar's assassination, every

spring would bring a new wave of programs. Journalist Dave von Drell explains quote. The programs flared anew each spring at Easter, when local priests reminded their flocks that the Jews killed Christ just as they had killed the Tsar, and rumors circulated afresh that the matzo of Passover was seasoned with the blood of slain Christian children. Along with the pagrams came severe restrictions on Jewish liberties. Access to

higher education and professional jobs was cut off. The Russian heartland, including the capital St. Petersburg and the largest city, Moscow, was closed to Jews. Some were driven from the cities in chains. So God damn man not, it's still harder hear you know all that, I know this story, I know of billion times, just the whole Russian Revolution. Like I don't think you understand the West Western civilization until

you really get your brain around that. And and I'm still it's still hard to hear where you're just like what the fund guys like, she's mane And then and then so you you you're running this apartheid, you know system, this cast system, apartheid and in and in this Jewish community mess around, get good at it, and now you think they got magical powers because they're good at it. And yeah, it just bothers me every time I have to hear it. It's not. I mean, it's one of

those things. Russian history. There's a short list of like the darkest regions of the world when you study history, right there's particularly Africa during colonialism. Um, there's China in like kind of the last two centuries or so during like that that they had a civil war that killed more people in World War Two. Nobody ever talks about. It's like the eighteen hundreds fucking wild. Um, there's obviously indigenous American history, but fucking Russian history is up there.

Good god, it is wild. Some ship goes down in Russia major and so this is the late eighteen hundreds where this is all that these programs are trying to ramp up. The eighteen eighties again, when when all of the story, when everything sort of comes into place to make the modern garment industry possible, is also when the programs launch and things only get worse for Russian Jews.

In the early nineteen hundreds, bizarre State was in a situation we might call the crumbles, which is a framing a friend of mine uses to describe what we're what's happening in the United States right now. It's the early stages of dissolution. Before the collapse of the government, revolutionary sentiment was at an all time high. There were constant protests against an incompetent and inefficient government, which many Russians rightly saw had left them decades behind the rest of

the world. Zara Nicholas the second was a coward and an idiot, and he had no idea how to write the ship, but he was cunning enough to blame the Jews for all of Russia's problems. His regime launched a massive propaganda campaign, which included producing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and a number of anti Semitic newspapers. One of the best known was called bess Rabbitts in the city of Kashinev. And this is part of the province of bess Arabia, which is why it's called miss Rabetts.

I'm sure I'm pronouncing everything wrong. Sorry, I'm not gonna come on like um, if I'm not going to get England, right, I'm certainly not getting Russian. Yeah. So bess are Betts was the only daily newspaper in the entire province, which meant that it was by default the only thing most Russian Christians had a chance to read every day for the news, and it was focused around anti Semitism. In nineteen o three, a Christian girl who worked as a domestic servant for a Jewish family in the city of

Kishenev committed suicide. Bess A Rabets lost no time in claiming that she had been murdered so her blood could be used to make matzo bread. Now, this all happened right before Easter Sunday, and it ended in a mob of two thousand people rioting through the Jewish section of town. People were murdered, some by having nails driven into their skulls. A baby, a live baby, was used to break windows on Jewish shops as like a yeah, like yeah, I

mean it's it's fucking bad. Yeah, dumb, that's where that whole like, yeah, that's where that whole myth thoughts about you know, Jews drinking blood for what the blood libel and all that stuff. Yeah, I mean this is an if that starts centuries earlier, right, Like that's old as hell, um, But this was just I mean this there's God only knows how many thousands of people get killed over that myth over the course of like that that's like a thousand years old, you know. But yeah, this is yet

another time when it erupted into violence. Goddamn. Kishenev was followed by other programs around Russia, and everything kept escalating in nineteen o four when Zar Nicholas the second decided

that going to war with Japan seemed like a good idea. Now, if you know any you know about the Russian navy today, nothing about the navy today, Well, the Russian Navy today has exactly one aircraft carrier, the Admiral kuznets Off, which has sunk itself a couple of times and runs off of what is essentially like unfiltered, unprocessed diesel oil, something called mizzoot, which is like the dirty like it keeps catching on fire, it keeps killing its sailors. It's like

always burning. It has to be tugged everywhere it goes. It's not a great navy today, is what I'm saying. Yeah, I was like, yeah, yeah, they don't really need a navy the way that you know other countries due to in order to based on agraphy, I blame them based on a geography, like there's there's not water for of all time. If you know anything about Japan, pretty fucking good at navies. This is this is what they do, Yeah,

especially the early nineteen hundreds. And so the worst navy in Europe goes up against the best navy in Asia and it it does not go very well for Russia. Um and really the only people surprised our racists. But obviously this is a huge political disaster. Russia loses a huge chunk of their navy, a funckload of men, a lot of prestige, and Zar Nicholas needs an excuse for

the disaster that follows. And of course he blames the Jews even absolutely, how about those dudes as those guys, those guys, that's why I picked a fight with the people who are better at this than us. But it's literally guys we've been killing for years that are responsible. Yeah, you literally took the knife to a gunfight. This is exactly that's where the saying comes. This is what y'all did. Yeah, you too a knife to for a gunfight, to a gunfight.

And then you blamed the group of people you don't allow to own knives. You blame the cooks. Yeah. Yeah, a huge wave of anti Jewish sentiment lights up in Russia again. These paramilitary groups called the Black Hundreds rise up. And these guys are like pro monarchist Russian fascist group. Well, fascist might be the wrong with anyway. They're they're they're a bunch of assholes. They start murdering Jewish people to punish them for what they and the Czar's press described

as conspiring with the enemy. The Black Hundreds openly stated that quote the extermination of the Jews was their goal. Now, the very worst campaigns of anti Semitic violence broke out the next year, in nineteen o five UM, but this

was still related to the war with Japan. Because the defeat in nineteen o four UM leads to mass unrest and protests and kind of a revolution, I mean a revolution, and in order to kind of clamp down on it, the Czar is forced to grant his people a constitution, and not like a good constitution broadly speaking, better than

I mean, they hadn't really had anything. Um. Now, this enrages Russian monarchists who want the Czar to be an autocrat, and a lot of these guys respond to the Czar compromising with revolutionaries by carrying out programs, and in fact, in November of nineteen o five, across the Russian Empire there are six hundred different programs. That's twenty programs per

day for the entire month. Yeah. Um, So I'm doing this to explain the fact that in like a ten year period, two million euro Eastern European Jews moved to the United States and this is why. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of them are very like very accurately seeing what's going to come in the nineteen forties and going, well, ship,

we gotta get the funk out of here. Yeah. The Jewish like historical trauma, like the idea of just and there antennas of knowing when like shipping to go bad, like trust them like like they know so yeah, then being like you know what, I think it's time. All right, I'm a head out, you know what I'm saying. I

think it's time for us to roll. Like, you know, there's a pretty there's a story like with with my my wife and her siblings, like they when they were trying to like you know, we're kids and they were trying to like you know, steal some makeup from the corner store or whatever. Like their brother was like, hey, it's we need to go. It's time to leave now.

And they were like, no, let's just get one more thing, more thing, and of course they both got caught, you know, but the brother bounced because he got the antenna of like, yeah, it's time, it's time for me to roll. And that's it's crazy because it's like, that's actually one thing that's important about your hood. Antenna's that when you at a party, you should be able to read the room to be like, all right, it's probably gonna go down pretty soon. I

think it's time for me a slide. Yeah. I mean there's just I mean, this is a little off topic, but there's not a whole lot that's more important in life than having a good antenna. For like, I shouldn't be here, Yes, yes, time for me to get the funk out. I think it's time for me to get out here. Yes, it's not gonna make a big deal about it, not gonna say anything, but I shouldn't be here, not gonna be in this room. I think I'm slide. I think I'm gonna slide, bro. I see I let

you all later. Man. I think it's not for me to slide. Ye, people should be prop Yo, drop a load on them where they supposed to be, Robert. They're supposed to be enjoying the products and services that support this podcast. Yes they are, because the products and services that support this podcast, and this is our only guarantee, have never orchestrated a campaign of programs across the Russian Empire, and not I think any of our supporters have done.

And and they will tell you when it's time to slide, they will, they will flood fair enough. Yeah. If I know anyone who I trust to tell me when to get out of an area, it's the dick Pills guys, or maybe Hello Fresh. Yeah, Okay, here's some ads. Ah, we are back and um just having the best time talking about the economic and environmental collapse of Italy and waves of racism in Russia that allowed Americans to have

cheap shirts in the early nineteen hundreds. Let's go um. So, like I said, all this violence in Russia leads a lot of Eastern European Jews to decide, like we should we should bounce um and yeah, more than two million of them pick up their lives and flee to the United States in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds. Now, two of these desperate, hopeful Jewish immigrants were Isaac Harris and Max Blanc. Both were born in Russia in the

late eighteen sixties. They fled their homes in the late eighteen eighties when they were young men in their twenties, after you know, all of those pagrams convinced them there wasn't a whole lot of hope in Russia. By the early eighteen nineties, they both made it through Ellis Island and settled in New York. Harris had trained as a tailor back in the Old Country, so he knew how to make garments and he set up a shop in the burgeoning garment industry. Max Blanc was an entrepreneur and

he got to work as a garment contractor. So this is how a huge amount of the fabric industry worked at the time then is now. Factories had to obey more rules with regular employees than they did with contract workers, and it also costs money to operate a big factory, so a lot of garment makers would hire independent contractors who would themselves hire workers and then pay them out

of a lump sum they received from the manufacturer. Both Blank and Harris got their start in the sweat shop years of of the garment industry, and sweatshop as a term we all hear um the way what we call a sweatshop to a it's kind of the term for like a giant factory with poor labor standards. Right, that's not what it originally was. Um Like the factories that we would consider today, sweatshops were actually a reaction to

sweatshops that were significantly less horrible than sweatshops. And to explain what the original sweatshop was, I'm going to quote from the book Triangle, The Fire that Changed America by Dave von Drell. Quote. Today, the word sweatshop describes any crowded factory of poorly paid workers. But in the late eighteen hundreds, the meaning was more specific and more dismal.

Sweatshops were generally dim and claustrophobic. Tenement rooms were independent contractors sweated greenhorns, that is the newest immigrants by working them more and more hours for less and less pay. So you have these big garment companies that have like, Okay, this is what we want you to make, and we'll we'll contract you know, said we have a dress, right and there's two or three pieces of the dress that

are sewn together. You hire two or three different independent contractors with their own teams of seamstresses, and they will each produce a part and then you'll have it put together, you know, by somebody else. And each of these independent contractors just packs as many laborers as possible into a tiny, low income apartment room. And that's a sweatshop, right, um, And you're basically trying to like get these people to do as much work as possible for as little money

as possible, and when they complain, you replace them. Yeah, did y'all call him? Did he call him greenhorns? Yeah? Greenhorns. These are immigrants who just got to the country. Okay, that's the phrase. That's it. There's no there's no bottom two slurs, is there? Yeah? Wait, because it's just I mean, I guess I wouldn't didn't think about that. I mean, I guess you could call it a slur. Maybe it's not a slur. I don't know. It was meant is

just like they're new. They don't know how things work there, don't like, yeah, they're there and they don't know. They don't you know, they don't know enough to add vacate for themselves. They don't speak the language, they don't have connections, so you can take advantage of them. And when they start to realize they're being taken advantage of, if they're

not worth paying more money, you fire them and you go. Basically, there were these like big market areas where you would sind people who had just gotten off the boat and you would just hire them up and mass throw them into sweatshops, work them until they couldn't handle it anymore, or until they got sick and died. Because these filthy apartments crammed full of people sewing, disease spreads pretty like a shipload of people die from disease in these places. Um. Now,

sweatshop work was miserable, but it was also inconsistent. Most weeks when there was a busy season, workers would be on for at least eight eighty hours at the low end to more than a hundred hours of labor at the high end. Some of these people made as little as three dollars a week if they were new. Good wages were kind of more like fifteen dollars a week. Um. I think kind of a more common salary was like

seven to eight something like that. Um. Many of them were promised good rates like fifteen dollars week, but found out on pay day that the needle and thread they used to make the garments was actually taken out of their paychecks. So obviously these are because these are independent contractors being hired by the big company. There's a bunch of ways they can funk over the little guy, and there's no there's no labor board, there's no way for

people who aren't rich to get justice. I mean, there's not really a lot of ways to do that now like back then you had even less options. Um, there's nobody looking out for these people. Um. Now the downside, So the upside of the sweatshop system is that it allows manufacturers to do their jobs for a lot cheaper. You don't have to rent a big factory, you don't have to deal with labor problems, um, and you don't

have to. One of the really big benefits is your fact you may have hundreds of workers, but they work in dozens of different sweatshops. None of them know each other. How the hell they're going to unionize? You know they can't. This is kind of smell like the gig economy. A little bit like I'm kind of like a little uber like you saying it's like you're you're a texting company that don't own no cars. So and I gotta so

I gotta pay for all to upkeep from my car. Yes, and so I'm paying for I'm paying for my gas, I'm paying for all. Yeah, not original or new what Uber and Lift and their fellow uh soulless monsters do. Okay cool? I was like, what is this? Sounds so familiar to me? Okay, h m hmmm. Um so yeah, yeah,

this is kind of a gig economy thing. Now. So those are all the advantages of the sweatshop system, but it has disadvantages to One of them is that because you're splitting it up, you're having all these different teams do parts of the whatever garment you're assembling. Say it's addressed, right, You have four different teams each doing a part. You have to transport all of the different parts they're making

to one area and have them put together. Um, it's less efficient, right, which means you make less clothing over a longer period of time. Um. And yeah. The other issue is that, like it's dangerous, conditions are incredibly cramped, nasty, and very flammable. Right, we're talking fabric, which burns pretty well if you ever let someone's clothing on fire. Um, But we're also talking about a shipload of cotton, like

process cotton, which is explosive. If you've ever gotten a large amount of cotton and lit that ship, that fucking that goes off like a bomb, yeah, very fast. And there's a bunch of like basically um um um graph paper tracing paper that you used to like cut out the things, which is also incredibly flammable. So fire start

in these places all the time. Um. And to kind of give more of a more detail about the conditions of these early sweatshops, I want to read a description of one in the eighteen nineties by a union leader named Bernard Weinstein. Quote. The boss of the shop lived there with his entire family. The front room and kitchen were used as workrooms. The whole family would sleep in one dark bedroom. The sewing machines for the operators were

near the windows of the front door. The basters would sit on stools near the walls at the center of the room. Amid the dirt and dust were heaped great piles of materials on top of the sofa, several finishers would be working well. The older workers would keep the irons hot and press the finished garments on special boards. So these are dangerous places, and whenever there's a fire or something, or whenever you lose workers, you also lose productivity.

So that's the main issue here is it's inefficient, it's cheap. It seems so efficient. Yeah, it seems so. I'm just musty and steamy as then the term sweatshop clearly like was they were they dying fabric too? So was there like a lot of like chemicals around some of these Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of like Again, not long lives in the garment industry. Just get turp and turpentine, just acid

tone right there in the corner. It's probably fair to say that few people in this country today, outside of maybe the agricultural industry, work a more dangerous or less healthy gig than sweatshop workers in this period. It's a bad business. My mother in law in the downtown like garment district for before she retired, that's what she did. It wasn't a sweat we could say, we could say definitively, it wasn't a sweatshop, you know. But she was definitely

a seamstress in downtown and they paid her pennies. And but her ability like now, like her ability to make things and to fix them, like I still marvel, Like she's kind of a mystery. She still doesn't really speak English what she does. She just don't like to, So she kind of a mystery to me. But her ability to like, yeah, her craft craftsmanship of like being a seamstress is still out of this world to me. And my my wife still has stories of like I would

be embarrassed about it. But yeah, my mom's like holes in our clothes didn't matter. But she would never like let us let them see her work environment because it was so awful. Yeah, I mean yeah, and it's certainly not a nice job to have now, um, but at least definitely less flammable. Yeah, less flammable people understand germ theory better. There's upsides. Yeah, So this nightmare industry is the one that Blank and Harris start in when they

moved to the United States. Now, Harris came up started working in the US in sweatshops filled with other immigrants, and he paid careful attention to the popular fashions of the day and to the different methods of mass production. Block meanwhile made a small fortune as one of the

most successful contractors in the city. So Blanc is running sweatshops and Harris is like a highly paid like because some of these people do make good money, right, the ones that we're doing the really difficult, the technical work, the ship that not that many people can do. Um And he's one of those guys. And the two men meet through marriage in the late eighteen nineties. And I'm

gonna quote from a write up in PBS as American experience. Here, Harris and Block were compatible, and they decided to interrupt partnership that would capitalize on Block's business sense and Harris's industry expertise. In nineteen hundred, they founded the Triangle Waste Company and opened their first shop on Wooster Street. At the turn of the century, the shirtwaist was a new

item styled after men'swear. Shirtwaists were looser and more liberating than Victorian style bodices, and they were becoming popular with the burgeoning population of female workers in New York City. Harris knew the details of garment production and the machinery involved in making a cost effective and worthy product. Blanc was the salesman, constantly meeting with potential buyers and traveling

to stores that carried their product. They took advantage of new technology, installing mechanical sewing machines which were five times faster than those run by a foot pedal. They priced their shirtwaist modestly, averaging about three dollars each. And this is all occurring at the same time as the women's liberation movement is really right. This is the period women don't have the right to vote yet, but they're agitating for it. Women are starting to join the workplace in

larger numbers. And the shirtwaist is is not just a popular garment that's fashionable. It's a liberatory garment. Right. It's like a blouse, it's like a sundress kind of in some ways. But it is a lot. If you look at the old Victorian fashion, there's like whale bone course, that's those massive dresses that you can't walk to the doorway in, things that limit a woman's ability to move around in the world. A shirtwaist doesn't. It's comfortable, you can run in it, you can exert yourself in it,

um and it looks good. Um, so this is like just all kind of happening at the big time. And Blanc and Harris capitalized on this explosion in in in because the shirtwaist is like a phenomenon in this period of time. Yeah, kind of a kind of a justice issue. That's crazy that it becomes like a symbol of freedom. That's crazy. Okay, Yeah, this is getting complicated. All right. I'm wearing something that I can work in, I can

exert myself, and I can dance in. I can you know, live an independent life, not needing to be carried around because my clothing stops me from breathing, you know, yo. Because whoever's idea was pret is to like to tie another like some just umbrellas around your waist to make you a trust bigger was just whose idea with this?

This is ridiculous? Yeah. Um. Now, part of making the garment production cost effective was consolidating for for Blank and Harris and some other guys who were kind of like similar thinkers to them, like big wigs, people who are emerging to be major leaders in the garment industry. They start to realize the sweatshop isn't the way to go.

If we're really going to scale this up right. It has some benefits, it makes some things easier on us, but we can't make clothing at the same quality and at the same scale that we could if we had large centralized factories where we're paying for the sewing machines, so it's not some contractor buying the cheapest foot pump sewing machines with modern electric ones and rows. So they they start to get factories. And Harrison Blanc are two

early guys who get massive garment factories to make these shirtwaists. Um. In nineteen o two they start the Triangle Factory out of the ash building in Greenwich Village and this is the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which is you know what the story we're talking about today is like the classic American story of like what we would now call a sweatshop going up in flames and killing a bunch of people.

It's important to understand that when this factory is started, it is a massive improvement over the original sweatshops and is considered an ultra modern facility right because it's it's it's cleaner, it's nicer, it's bigger, there's room. Um. It had been built in nineteen o one, so the year before they open the factory. Unlike tenements, which are often made out of just like wood and kind of like low quality materials, this building is mostly made out of

steel and iron. It's advertised as being fireproof by its architects, which is thinking, yeah, there is building that can down. Yeah. Yeah, I guess if every other building is basically paper mache, you're gonna be like, yeah, this one. At least this is metal. So I could see the cased the confidence. But bro man, can't ever let that come out of your mouth. That's teach you. Yeah, you call something uh

unburned downable and it's gone burned down. That's just how Yeah, that's why I always advertise everything I make is very flammable and dangerous. This is dangerous. To be careful, I do so. Shirtwaist manufacturing involved a lot of again flammable things. There's a great deal of thin paper cutouts for tracing. There's thousands of pounds because you're making in such volume, there's thousands of pounds of dry fabric and cotton um that are kind of like tossed aside as you're making

shirtwaists um. Now, the fact that this factory is not made out of wood like tenements, is a huge plus. But the ash building was far from safe. It had poor ventilation, it was badly lit, It had incredibly narrow stairwells, and it had no functional fire escape. It had a fire escape, but the fire escape on the building ended directly like ten ft or something above a basement skylight.

So like we're falling into when they when they build this thing, like the city is like, hey, this fire escape is an up to code, and the architect is like, don't worry, we'll fix it asap, and then nothing happens. Right, Um, it looked pretty on this side. And look when you look down from the fire escape, you see that beautiful light coming up. I'm telling you, it's amazing. It's an

aesthetic choice, just like the Titanic's lovely. Yeah. Now, the most dangerous thing about the factory may have been that it was tall. Harrison Blanc rented out the eighth, ninth,

and tenth floors. Now, the reason this is dangerous is that the New York City Fire Department could Their ladders only reached six floors up, so you can't get water to the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors and you can't evacuate people using fire engines from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, right, problem playing on the edge, bro, Yeah, Now, I just I noted earlier the Triangle Factory was in a lot of ways a huge advancement in terms of just like quality of life for the people working there.

And I don't want to pretend like it's not. This would have been a significant improvement in a lot of people's eyes. But that doesn't mean it didn't have a lot of problems outside of being super flammable, and there was a lot of the fact that now Harrison Blanc and people like them are putting all these workers together in factories. The benefit of that is they're more productive.

The downside of that, for a manager's perspective is, now all these guys are talking and they're talking about how much they're getting paid, and they're talking about how much the boss is fucking them, and they're developing a sense of solidarity. And what do you get when that happens. You get motherfucking strikes. Oh unions. Now, the striking at the Triangle Factory actually predated any kind of garment union

existing there. Their first strike in nineteen o eight was what's called a wildcat strike, which is when workers just go on strike without having a union, right, and it's actually a big fight because like one of the so

they we'll talk about that a minute. So there's this big wildcat strike in nineteen o eight, and and this kind of feeds into a broader trend in the city of New York, which is the center of US garment manufacturing, and a lot of garment makers are going on strikes, wildcats, strikes. They're starting to form unions nineteen o eight, nineteen o nine, UM, because they're realizing they're making a small number of people

a shipload of money and they're getting treated terribly. Um. These people had, you know, because they were now inside you know, these factories that weren't strike proof. Um, they

could uh, they could organize like this. UM. And one of the problems of this is that like the bigger when you have these huge factories, um, that are the entire operating profit of these corporations, that actually makes them more vulnerable to strikes because they're paying rent on this massive space, they're paying for all this electricity, they're paying every day even when the workers don't come in so the longer you're able to keep workers on strike, the

more money you cost the bosses, which provides extra pressure to the bosses. Um so the fact that this could obviously the bosses consider any kind of strike to be like an existential threat, which leads them to embrace a bunch of union busting tactics. Now, the most basic tactic involved just the layout of the facility itself, and in the case of the Triangle factory, Harris had designed the layout of the sewing floor specifically to make it hard

for workers to have conversations. That's the first way you try to stop this. Make it difficult for them to talk to each other, right, But people find a way to talk to each other. It's something people are always going to do. This doesn't work for long, and as time goes on, the bosses need to develop more advanced tactics to bust unions. One of them was what's called the inside contractor system. This was an attempt to merge the benefits of like the contractor system that the sweatshops

operated under, with the strength of the factory. Management would give would basically rent space on the assembly floor to a contractor who they paid a lumps to make clothing, and that contractor would hire line workers, which he then paid out of the lump sum. So right, it's a

it's it's it's the same basic idea. If we separate these workers from the corporation UM, then they're going to be focused on if they're angry on this independent contractor who hired them, and also he's going to side with us because he's going to be employing these people. But that's actually not how it worked out. As a general rule, these inside contractors UM considered themselves to be workers rather than management, and they were as liable to go on

strike as the workers. See, So I still think. I still think man like, I try not to be too reductive for very vastly Like you don't want to oversimplify the complicated, and then at the same time, you don't want to overcomplicate the simple, you know, So I know

both of those things are important. That said, I'm like, you're doing everything except for just just pay pay to workers and treat them will like if you really want to stop, you in like, it's just if you just want us to Like, I think about that all the time. I don't know if y'all saw the story about Applebee's offering free appetizers if you come interview for their job, and I'm like, you get a free app with an interview.

I'm like, or you could just pay more, Like if you just paid more, or just have some transparency, even if it's as simple as like, look, dude, there's how much the building costs. There's how much the electricity costs. This is what we can afford. Now, are y'all? You know what I'm saying, Like, we're gonna treat you as best as we can. This is what we got. Like anybody reasonable would be like, all right, well, let me make an educated decision to be like, all right, cool.

If that's what you can handle, you should you show me that's what you can handle. Okay, work, But you're talking about you offer some free apps? Is I can get you know what I'm saying, I can get the hot wings. I'm like, well, or you could just just pay better? And I just so yeah, when I'm like, you're coming up with all these schemes and ways to yea redesign the whole floor, so y'all don't talk or it's like a company all we're going to have a

holiday party, or we're gonna have pizza today. It's like, or you could pay us. Yeah, it's like, you know, casual Friday's Like, I'm like, or or or heear me out health insurance. That's good. Yeah, you could maybe maybe just a dental plan. It's the edit button on Twitter. I'm like, you're doing it always works? Yeah, would we

be doing great with an edit button on Twitter? I'm just like, what the hell are these stories you're going so so now you're putting all this ship on the thing, and I'm like, I feel like we've all just been asking for an edit button now. Not that I have no horse in the race with this particular that particular example, but I could say for a lot of years, that's all we've been asking a Twitter. All the other stuff you're doing is great, but just I don't know, man,

seems simple anyway, you know what all system? Yeah, it could products time for the services that support this podcast. What's happening. I'm just thinking about the way the corporate system works and how we're all kind of with this engine of death. Yeah, anyway, here's ads. Ah, we're back and we're having a good time, just to just not thinking about the modern day implications of the things you're

talking about here, UM, just a good way to do it. UM. So the owners we just talked about kind of these they have a couple of different strategies they used to try to stop workers from unionizing UM, and they're not very successful at this because it's really hard to stop people from not idea offying with each other more than the bosses who are exploiting their excess productivity for profit.

So the owners of the Triangle company next decided to create a fake union, the Triangle Employees Benevolent Association, which is actually kind of what happens to cops before police unions were a thing, right, That's what Police Benevolent Association start as, is like fake unions because cops can't unionize. Obviously, they get the ability to unionize, and it's a horrible problem.

But the Triangle owners try the same thing. They they can employee Benevolent Association, and their hope is that they can use that to siphon off this energy that's going into the union movement UM and kind of push it somewhere that can't harm their bottom line. But since the union was run by relatives of Blank and Harris, it was obvious to the workers what was going on. They're

never as dumb as the bosses think they are. Ever so, Blanc and Harris justified their attempts to stop unionization by claiming they had a competitive need to keep prices low. The reality was that their business was bringing in more than a million dollars a year by nineteen o eight, which is the modern equivalent of thirty million dollars. Both men were extremely comfortable. They both owned mansions on the West Side. Harris had four family servants, Blanc had five.

They both had chauffeurd cars delivered them to work every day. And this is when like just having a car means you're doing pretty good. You know, yeah, where you go for Sunday drives? Yes, because you got yeah. Yeah. And these guys not only have cars, they have cars and they have drivers. Um. And the Triangle Family Factory isn't their only factory. They have factories in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

They own a couple of different companies making garments. These guys are very well off, so they're not they're not doing this ship. It's the same thing with like McDonald's today or whatever. They're not clamping down on employee organizing the SAMI with McDonald's. They're not clamping down on salaries because it's the only way to be profitable. They're doing it because they want to have uh fortunes. Now, what was happening to the Triangle Factory was emblematic of an

explosion across the garment industry. A handful of tycoons were becoming unfathomably wealthy, where thousands of workers made as little as three dollars a week for more than eighty hours of painstaking labor. And I'm gonna quote from PBS again, Harrison Blocks Factory was competing with over eleven thousand other textile manufacturers in New York City. In order to retain their high profit level, they had to produce the cheapest

shirtwaist in the largest quantity. They demanded greater efficiency from their production team, which meant working long hours for little pay, and the owners kept scrupulous inventory of their supplies. A four man monitored the largely female immigrant workforce during the day and inspected the women's bags as they left for the night. As an additional safeguard against theft, Max Blanc ordered the secondary exit door to be locked. So I

think episode on the Quabolgno supermarket fire. Yes, super flammable workspace always has a locked exit. Yeah, that's gonna come into play. Yeah. What is that term called a secure like a secure pinch? Like I forget what that term is? A choke point, a choke point. Yeah, you created a choke point because you're worried about these ladies stealing needles and thread. All right, got it, But air my life and day. Yeah, now everyone's endangered. Yeah, but they're not

thinking about that. And to be fair, one of the things I should note here we're talking about all of this unionizing workers are angry, they're agitating for better conditions. The unions aren't agitating for better safety conditions. That's not really on anyone's mind right now, right the thought has not a safety conscious period. Yeah, the thought has Yeah I had you, dude, what an important context wrinkle is?

Like safety is not on anyone's mind. That's crazy, Like I forgot about that, Like that ain't even cross their mind. I mean there are I'm not gonna say it's not on anyone's mind, because there are. There are garment fires like the month before the Triangle shirtwaist fire. There's a

horrible fire that kills like twenty six people. And I'm sure there are individuals who are like, we need to but but when you're talking about the broader union movement, safety is not one of the things they're pushing for in a big way. And and this is again, this is the point in which a work week is eighty

to like a hundred and ten hours. So they like they're concerned, is like, it's a relief if I die on the job because I don't have to do another week, you know, like because I gotta be here for another seventeen hours. Yeah. Um, yeah, So that that's not really the focus of the When we were talking about the complaints the workers have, poor safety isn't really one of them.

I'm guessing if your other option is like, Okay, I could either stay here in New York and do this eighty hour week in this building, or I could go down to Virginia and dig in a coal mine that seems a lot more dangerous than this, So I guess

you're talking relatively. It's like, well, I'm not working with dynamite, dang. Yeah. Well, and you're also thinking, again, these are all two thirds of these people are refuge Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe who are like, yeah, the building slam a double, but nobody's actively trying to beat me to death with my own baby. Yes, yes, you're not beat yes yeah, yeah,

yeah yeah. Anyway, yeah. When you're trying to get in people's heads in this period, you have to acknowledge even the very wealthy and comfortable have a higher acceptance of danger threshold than the average person, like the average working class person on the street today, because life was just more dangerous in a lot of ways. Dangerous. This is

it was sucked up time. Yeah, dangerous. Yes. So, in the fall of nineteen o nine, a new union had gotten started among New York garment workers, headed by a bold young woman named Clara Lemlick. Over the course of the year, Limlick could unionized garment workers from other factories large and small, and successfully brought many of them many of their employers to the table to increase wages. The big thing Limlick and her fellow union this we're fighting

for was a fifty two hour work week. So that's the like again. Eventually, this list feeds into the this massive nationwide fight for the forty hour work week at the time, they're like, the work week is a d plus hours. They're like, fifty two that it's relaxing, being a break, let's go. Yeah, more than a standard work week for an American today is was like, whoa, this will be nice. A lot of Americans work, you know

that much these days? Yeah, not to minimize that, but at the time, the idea that you would only have to work fifty two hours was like something worth fighting for. Um. And they were also fighting for more regular and fairer pay scales, right. They wanted to know exactly what they were getting and not have these surprise like, oh, you've got to pay for the thread, Like they were fighting for all of this ship um. And yeah, they were

fighting for a survivable wage. The minimum wage isn't really a big buzzword at this time, but that's kind of they're fighting for within their industry that kind of now. Blanc and Harris first fought back against this by threatening to fire any employees who joined the union that Limlick had created because and their justification was that it was competing with their fake in house union. They followed through on the promise, shuttering their factory and publicly soliciting new

employees in local papers. When the union drive started, the Triangle workers decided to strike in response. This meant that the workers who had been there limlock and they were like, Okay, don't come to work, we'll hire new workers, fuck you. And the workers are like, well, will surround the factory and we won't let these new employees in, will block them off so the scabs can't enter. Like, that's what a strike is in this period, it's not just not working,

it's stopping the factory from being able to work. Now, this happened a number of times in like nineteen o nine through nineteen ten, and in a number of cases these kind of attempts to blockade the factory ended with these horrific street battles. And that happened with the Triangle factory. This is happening in other factories to right. This is a broad trend across New York. Um. The Triangle factories

particularly large, and so what happens there is particularly significant. Now, you gotta remember almost all of the strikers here are young women. Um and block and Harris countered them. So you've got all these young female strikers blocking the factory to stop scabs from going in, so block and Harris hire a bunch of scabs. But in order to get the scabs in, they need to fight their way through

these women blockading the factory. And the way they do that is by hiring a fa lenx of Pimpson prostitutes to act as the tip of the spear and the solid Oh my god, that is heartless, wow, because they're like, you're talking, You're you're talking. If you're talking about a prostitute in nine nine New York, you're talking about a hard lady. She's talking about a woman who carries a couple of knives on her and you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,

And that's that's why they hire them. And they are scary, and they beat the ship out of these striking work it's really ugly. And the police show up and basically fight alongside the prostitutes and pimps and arrest a bunch of the striking workers while turning a blind eye because this is we're not gonna get into this a lot. And and Dave von Dreau does a good job in his book Triangle of talking about Tammany Hall, the big corrupt political situation at this point in time. You could argue,

it's not all that different. Now. The gangsters, the pimps, the prostitutes, and the cops can all be on the same side a lot of the time because they're all part of this incredibly corrupt criminal government of New York City. That is can can just as easily call up gangsters as it can cops because they're the same thing. You know. Yeah, yeah that this is such a rad time, just wild, wild West, like yeah, yeah, like, yeah, yeah, you just

as much. Yeah, you know, Joey two fingers is just as much gonna get a call from the the governor as he is from his mom. You know what I'm saying to be like, Yeah, let's do let's just run down s that's this is crazy, what a what a time to live in. Yeah, yeah, we gotta uh get the squad on the street. We gotta help these prostitutes beat up a bunch of garment workers. That's just the way things working moms, they're all working moms, probably, Yeah, sure,

a huge street fight between a bunch of working women. Um. Now, blanch and Harris were not the only factory owners who hired cops or gangsters to attack strikers, but they were among the most brutal and committed. Now during this period, a shipload of smaller manufacturers are willing to negotiate just a few days into the strike. They don't have the kind of financial resources Triangle does. Um. There there they can see that like, okay, they're not really asking, Like

it's not going to stop us from being profitable. Let's just give in and we can get back to making you know, clothing and ship. Um. The Triangle owners Blanket Hairs hold their ground. Obviously, they hire police to beat up strikers in a bunch of occasions, but that starts to backfire because again, these laborers are all young women and you have these cops just beating them bloody in the street and arresting them. And that doesn't look good.

Like that ship makes the news and people start to get really angry about what's happening, and so they and that makes the NYPD look bad. They have to stop for a while. You know, they never entirely stopped, but like there's this kind of ebb and flow of how brutal can we be before we have to stop because we don't want to like piss people off too much.

Um And the sympathy that starts to build for these ladies strikers, because again at this time you also have the Suffragette movement, and the Suffragette movement is not a just a poor working class and in fact it's largely a wealthy woman movement like the upper class ladies, and they get on board behind these poor garment workers and see this as part of this broader fight for women's rights. So all of these and some of these people are like the wife of JP Morgan, like women with some

fucking funds behind this. Um. A number of them are really wealthy widows UM. And they start getting together and raising funds UM. And part of what some of the funds are to help these women pay their rent paid by food and stuff because they're not working during the strike.

Some of it. A number of these women, some of them are just kind of getting in on it, like you'll you'll hear about like JP Morgan's wife I think gives like a hundred dollars, which is more money back then, but it's clearly just like, oh, I'll donate to this cause there are some There's this one woman in particular who would show up every night after the arrests to bail these women out when they got their bail set.

And one night, because so many women got arrested, she runs out of cash and she mortgages her mansion in order to bail these ladies out. So there is some some pretty rad solidarity happen to Yeah, yeah, um, And so Blanc knows like these block and harass. They're not dumb. They know that things are starting to go against them, public opinions going against them at this point, and the only way to get public opinion back on your side

is with the media blitz of your own. Now, I just said a lot of newspapers were very sympathetic to the strikers. One that was not was the biggest newspaper in town, the New York Times, which was always on the side of the bosses in this period. And we could argue today, oh, here we go. So Blanc succeeds in getting a New York Times reporter to feature him in a story that shows his factory full of workers

despite the strike. And these guys, no, see, they're happy, it's just some bad And in the article this won't sound familiar to anybody, but Blank through the New York Time basically says, look at how happy all of my workers are the only reason these poor deluded women are striking is because of outside agitators who have there are Yeah, baby, he did both. There a few bad apples. And man, the playbook, the playbook is undefeated. We put it from the same playbook in ninety oh one. Yeah, it's it's

very funny. Um yea and yeah. And so they have to put out this New York Times article. They do this press blitz, and they also start to try to organize with their fellow business owners. Um. And right around this period of time, they write a letter to a group of their fellow factory owners. Gentlemen, you are aware of the agitation. Wait, I'm actually gonna use my old Tommy boys. Gentlemen, you are aware of the agitation that is now going on in our shops. Are satisfied workers

are being molested and interfered with. The so called union is now preparing to call a general strike in order to prevent this irresponsible union from gaining the upper hand. Let us know as soon as you possibly can, if you would be willing to form and join an employer's mutual protection association. So they make a union for the bosses. Yeah, but in order to fight the union of the workers. Got a union too, looks like unizing works. Now this

still exists today, we call it the federal government. But that's a story for another day. Yo, you slid down in. That's the smooth yea down here, good man. So Blanc and Harris, Yeah, respond to this unionization effort by basically making their own union for rich assholes. And part of their rage at their workers efforts to unionize comes from the fact that the Triangle Shirt waste factory was, as I've said, by most standards, a very progressive and safe factory.

It's considered that in its time, um Blanc and Harris also, these guys were not born rich. They again, these are dirt poor Jewish immigrants who come to the US fucking desperate.

They know what it is to be poor, and they don't have any kind of class solidarity obviously, but they consider it a personal attack that their employees unionize against them, right that Like, so they don't have any solidarity for their workers as former workers, but they're offended that they're workers don't treat them like fellow workers and treating them like hey, I'm come on, come on, I'm on the guys, I'm one of the girls. It's got a car you're

dying of Typhus were the same. Come on, man, ask more to you, gotta work hard, suck up man, I'm on yeah. Nah, I'm good, bro. So that's what what what do we miss? I'm laughing problem, I'm good, bro, I'm good. Yeah. It's like because that's that's the way I would feel about because it's funny to me that like it messed with they, It messed with the identity and a pride when it was like wait, wait, so we're we're not We're not one of the We're not one of the squad. No more, you're not happy with

our you're not happy with our building? Like nah, man, no you're not. That's crazy. Yeah nah good yep. So, in addition to hiring cops and gang members to beat strikers, Blanc and Harris who the term they're known by the name they're known by this period is the shirtwaist Kings, because they're like the biggest shirtwaist dudes in the city. This period, they also hit upon what's kind of a

brilliant plan. They start bribing Italian priests from conservative Catholic parishes to give lectures to their Italian factory workers on company time, explaining that laborers have a duty to be obedient to their bosses because again, the whole labor force is basically Jewish immigrants and Italian immigrants, so a big part of their ideas. It's the colonialism thing, right, It's what Britain did in Africa. You got you have this

population united against you. You've got to split them along ethnic lines or religious lines, and they try to do both. It doesn't work. In this period. The Italians and the Jews stick together to funk the bosses, um, which is a nice tale um. So yeah, the Triangle bosses also tried to bribe the remaining employees, the ones who refused to strike with good times. They would start holding dance

parties during lunch and give out food and prizes. So they do also try to treat the workers who don't strike better in order to like stop them from striking. But that's kind of a minimum aspect of what they're actually trying this period. So obviously none of this stops the strike. The violence in the streets continues, uh, and peace would kind of you know, you would have this this period where peace would return after a bad skirmish, and then a few days later strikebreakers would be sent

into crackheads and the cycle would start again. Um. Yeah. At one point, the judges get angry that the rich ladies who had banded together to back this union, um, we're bailing everyone out. So they start sending arrested strikers to do weeks of hard labor in a penal colony. And the strikers start like making badges and awards to give women who do time and the penal colony for the movement and stuff. It's kind of a way to you gotta reward people who go through this ship. Let go. Yeah,

that's kind don't do it. Yeah, now it's time ward. Where on, Blanc and Harris decided, like they do get beaten down by this to a degree, and they decided they're willing to come to the table and grant their workers most of their demands. So they're willing to give into the fifty two hour work week, they're willing to work to raise wages. The only thing they're not willing

to do is given to the union's key demand. So this the w the w t U L, which is the union these these women form all across New York City for garment workers. One of the things they're trying to get is an agreement from all of these shops to be union only shops. In other words, they won't hire anyone who isn't a part of the union, which obviously makes the union more powerful. And that's the one thing. Eventually, even Blanc and Harris are willing to come to the

table on everything else. Um. And because Blanc and Harris have a union of factory owners, they're able to get a lot of other big factories to resist this push to make it a union only shop what's called a closed shop. Now. Meanwhile, the fact that all of these owners had been willing to grant the other demands, this starts to upset the wealthy liberal ladies who had adopted the garment workers strike as a cause, And they're like, well, I do you need it to be a union only shop? Right?

Haven't you gotten enough? Isn't it time for this to be over? Um? So that's a factor to it, And this this is kind of the start of the union movement fracturing. And there's more to it than just the rich ladies being like, haven't you got it gotten enough?

There's also a lot of anger from the extreme leftist organizers in the movement because they they're really unhappy as soon as these rich kind of liberal ladies show up and start throwing their money around um, and they're like, well, hey, this is supposed to be a class movement against the rich, Like why are we celebrating which women who, no matter how much they donate, are still never going to suffer as a result of it. And so they get angry at the rich ladies who do play a key role

in this union being able to survive. The rich ladies are like, you guys are asking for too much. Why do you need this? You know, because they don't actually know what it's like to be that desperate um. And in addition to all of that, there's frustration among more moderate union organizers because a lot of union organizers in

this period are not socialists. There's a lot of socialists in the movement, but like Samue Gompers, who's the head of the a f l UM the American FED, he's the biggest union head, is anti socialist, but he's a union man. UM. So there's there's a lot there and the the union organizers who aren't socialists are angry because a lot of the more radical socialists, who are some of the best and most dedicated organizers, want to make this strike more than just a strike for better conditions

for garment workers. They're kind of trying to push for a broader feminist revolt. They're adding demands for suffrage to the list of demands the garment workers are making, and this frustrates the more moderate strikers who are like, well, we just want a more equitable deal. We're not really fighting for women's liberation. So the strike movement, it does

achieve most of its goals. They get the fifty two hour workweek, they get wages raised, they get a couple of other things, but it also fractures before they get everything that they want, which is you know, usually how things go right. Yeah, I mean that's what failure. Yeah, yeah, that's what a negotiation is. Like you get you know, a piece here, a piece there. The color that this adds of at again is also, wow, that's not familiar

of like who you want? Yeah, never happened before to where it's like you only want a certain person to help and if it's wrong, like I think of like when my my tad. My my five year old, is like, hey, can someone watch you know, TV with me? And I'm like, I'll watch TV with you. She's like, not you, and I'm like, wait what. She's like, I want mommy to watch TV with me. I'm like, mommy's working right now.

And then she'll be like what about my sister? And I'm like, your sister can't either because she's on punishment. I could watch it with you. I'm not doing anything. Well, no, I don't want to watch TV anymore. And it's just like only the disrespect I do not have. Nobody's a daddy's girl in my house. It's the worst. But the idea of being like just the complication of like whose movement is this? I say, I would say, like whose

movement is this? And that's where when the whole like the play of the outside agitator play, that's where you're like, well, well crap, dude, Like you kind of got a point there because y'all outside of this are saying this is your cause and so you got this bigger cause. In the meantime, these ladies who are actually doing the work are like, I don't know what all y'all arguing about we just I don't want to work for eighty hours and like that's what I'm here for. And I I

see how and we really can use your money. I don't care how much of us don'te that you got money for us? Like yeah, thank you, you know what I'm saying. And you're saying, wait, so you're saying we shouldn't take their money. So I'm like, okay, well do you got money for us? Oh? You ain't got no money for us? Because you mad at them. It's just like, well crap, dude, like like, well none of you'all work here,

like like we actually work. It's so the color of that. Yeah, you know if anybody's got a point, right, everybody, and everyone's got a point, yeah, the point you know, these rich ladies they do have a point where they're like, you guys have gotten a lot, like maybe and and people haven't been working for months, that people keep getting arrested and beaten. Maybe it's time to just take what you can get. The socialists have a point where they're like,

but this doesn't fix nearly everything. Um, and you don't. Really it's not really your place to say when we should settle, because you're never going to have to settle you're rich. And then the kind of more moderate laborers are right when they have a point, when they're like, well, we don't want this to be a big this isn't about socialism force. This is about not working eighty hours a week, and like that's kind of where my interest

in it ends. You know, I'm some nineteen year old who just got here and I just want my life to be less miserable, and nobody I'm not trying to trying, I hope. I'm not portraying anyone is right or wrong here. This is just what happens, you know. Yeah, that's my pointures along these lines. Yeah, yeah, that's my point of like the color of life, where it's like it's like like histories and living color, and that's what it is.

Where it's like you've got all these different issues and you can't you can't look at it and be like they're right there wrong, they're right there wrong. It's just so complicated. That's crazy. It's just yeah, that's just how

things happen. Now, this kind of Peter's out. They get more or less a win in early nineteen ten, and for the next thirteen months or so, life returns to kind of a semblance of normal in the garment industry at the especially at the Triangle shirtwaist factory, production resumes, uh. People get back to work with more reasonable hours and

more money. Some things had changed, there'd been significant winds, but obviously, as I noted, nobody was fighting for improved safety here because they thought the factory was pretty safe um or at least compared to what they would had been used to. And another thing they didn't really change was the greed of Blanc and Harris and their fellow bosses.

Now we've talked a lot about how flammable garment factories are um and one of the things that had been done by Harris, who set because he was a great he knew how to tailor and stuff, had set up down out the layout of this factory is he had designed the floor of the factory so that the cutters and these are the people who are like cutting out the different sort of like scraps that get sewn together. These are the people who produced the most waiste scrap

and waste paper. So these guys all do their's work on these enormous tables. And one of Harris's innovations is to put trash waste baskets underneath the table, so you can just sweep your waist right into the right under the table, very efficient. This also means that you get hundreds of pounds of cotton and tracing paper and cloth crammed together loosely so that there's air in between all of them underneath these tables, which basically makes them fuel

air bombs. Yeah, I was like, wait, yeah, yeah, so everyone knew these were horrific fire hazards. The Triangle factory had to note where the accidental fires and I'm specifying accidental. I'll explain why here. Prior to nineteen eleven, one of which was put out by Harris himself. Buckets of water were stationed around the factory floor. A hose that was supposed to work was cut kept near the cutting table,

although it had been allowed to rust shut. Most significantly, though, the building did not have a sprinkler system and the workers did not participate in fire drills. Now, neither of these things were required in garment factories under New York law in nineteen eleven, but sprinklers were widely available in

fact starting in the eighteen eighties. They've become required in New England cotton mills, alongside firewalls and fireproof doors to create safe zones for employees in the event of ablaze. Cotton mills, as we've said, cotton's explosive, basically very dangerous places. In the eighteen eighties, all of these things come to cotton mills, and cotton mills suddenly become pretty safe places

to work by comparison. But this doesn't get required in garment factories, even though they're dealing with a lot of the same materials. Um Now, part of the reason why these weren't put in the factories has to do with greed, and not the kind of greed you think. A lot of times people like will say, well, they didn't put in sprinklers because sprinkler systems were expensive. That's not really

the reason. The real explanation for why there were no sprinklers in the Triangle factory starts with the way insurance worked in Manhattan during this period. So all of the insurance brokers, the guys who are selling insurance to companies, colluded together because these guys make their money. When you sell a policies an insurance broker, you get a percentage of the value of that sale. That's where how you

make your money. So you make more money if you sell more policies, which means you don't want to be denying anybody policies. And normally the way you think about an insurance policy, the safer your building is, the more safety measures like like sprinklers you have in your building, the lower insurance premiums are. But if your insurance premiums are lower, that means the broker gets less money. So the broker doesn't want to give you They want to

have a lot of insurance policies for dangerous buildings. They don't want safety measures in because that means they get less money. So I'm gonna quote again from the book Try Changed America here. I know it's pretty fucked. The hustle everywhere, damn and and one of the things, so these brokers are all colluding together. And the brokers are not the insurance companies, right. The brokers work for the companies, but the insurance companies are the ones on the line

the broker doesn't pay when there's a fire. And one of the ways in which the brokers kind of get over the fact that what they're doing should be in the worst interest of the insurance company, is they they get.

They basically split up the risk for each of these insurance policies among multiple insurance companies, so that if a factory has a horrible fire that destroys a bunch of stuff, every company only pays a little bit of money, and the brokers get as much money still because they're selling as many so they they're they're sharing the risk because none of them have to work in these factories. They don't give a ship how many people die. They just

care that they keep selling policies. Um, so I'm gonna quote from Trying Goal the fire that changed America here. Blanck and Harris were perfect examples of this skewed system. Few factory owners paid higher rates than they did, and as a result, they commanded the loyalty of the most powerful brokerage in town. The Triangle owners were so called rotten risks in insurance parlance because they kept having fires, and not just little ones that could be put out

by hand. They were repeaters, having collected on several substantial claims, and yet they had little difficulty buying all the insurance they wanted. Some of these repeat fires were likely deliberate. In April of nineteen o two, Blanck and Harris called the fire department about a fire. The n y f D arrived a little too late to save the inventory of the factory, which burnt in its entirety. Thankfully, no workers were present at the time. Blanck and Harris collected

a hefty insurance payment. Six months later, they had another fire, also early enough in the morning that no workers were present. Block and Harris collected thirty two thousand dollars in damage from both fires. Both blazes occurred at the end of the busy season, which was the part of the year in which factory owners who had overrest made a demand for their product tended to wind up wind up with

a bunch of extra inventory they couldn't sell. So this, these very convenient fires happened right at the time when they needed to get rid of excess inventory. Um in nineteen oh seven, there were two more fires and another factory that they owned, and they followed the same pattern. So these guys are starting fires to destroy their excess to inventory and collecting the insurance on stuff they can't sell.

That's part of how they stay profitable. And then you and if you split the insurance among multiple guests, everybody's happy. Everybody's happy. The people that will die. Yeah. Yeah. So the fact that it works this way means insurance brokers don't really want to confront this abuse of their policies. Um,

because the brokers collect the bounty and each new policy. Now, some of the insurance companies aren't always happy about this because this does cost the money, but the brokers are fine with this ship um, and garment factory owners are like, this becomes a crucial part of their business. It protects them from the kind of thickle whims of the industry. Um because you know, then, as I think now, the fashion industry hinges on what happens in Paris that year.

So if you are geared up to make a bunch of top hats or coat tails or whatever, and then some fucker in Paris decides that's not the hot item, you have a bunch of ship you can't sell, and you gotta light it on fire. Yeah, Sophie and I do the same thing with podcasts we can't air. Um. Yeah, you just gotta light it on fire. You gotta light it on fire. Remember them, Remember the trucker hat craze dude. Oh god, yeah yeah. So I'm like, what about the guy that like sitting on a box of trucker hats?

Too bad? You can't the Von Dutch joints. Yeah, you gotta burn them things. Yeah. I think there's a lot of Von Dutch hats going around in a rack or someplace. Now. It's like with all of the old shirts from political candidates that wind up in Ecuador someplace. Yeah yeah, yeah. So um Block and Harris again not the only business owners to do this. This is the norm in the industry. But the fact that such a practice is the norm means that factory owners, like insurance brokers, have a vested

interest in avoiding fire prevention measures. Sprinklers can't discriminate between a safe, intentional fire meant to create create an insurance payment, or an accidental fire. And if you disable your sprinklers before you carry out an intentional fire, that looks suspicious and you'll get in trouble with the cops. Yeah, now it's arson. So you don't want to have sprinklers because

you rely on being able to start fires. Now, as it happened, nineteen eleven was the year that Paris turned on the short waist demand dropped in so many manufacturers were burning their wares that one large insurance company had to cancel their policies with all shirtwaist makers. Block and Harris stayed insured though and in fact they were over insured. They were paying enormous ray. It's to carry more insurance than the actual value of the content of the factory.

Why they did this because this costs them a lot of money. Up until you get the payout, you're spending a lot of money. Dave von Drell, who wrote the book Triangles, a very good journalists. The reason he suspects both of these men did this is that they were planning because again, these guys own a bunch of factories, right, they have multiple companies making shirtwaists. They have a bunch

of excess inventory. He suspects at the end of the year, they were going to take all of their excess inventory, put it in the Triangle factory and lighted on fire for an insurance payment with several million modern dollars. Hints von Drell writes, quote, they could not put sprinklers in their factory if they thought it might need to burn sometime, and they might think that instituting fire drills in a world where few factories had them would make them look

suspiciously conscious of the issue. So they're not even willing to do fire drills because it might make it look like they're expecting a fire, because they're absolutely planning to burn this sucker down. Yeah. Yeah, What a strange interrogation though, to where it was like, hey, why are y'all doing fire drills? It's like it just in case there was there might have been fired. I don't understand why this was Like, no, nobody else they didn't do no fire

drills buying over there. It's interesting you started doing fire drills right before you have to think on on fire, Like why wouldn't you play it cool enough to be like, yeah, thank god, we did it, like, you know, we saved a lot of lives. We saved a lot of lives.

Why we did it, you know? Man? Yeah, when you when you gotta hustle, though, when you when you're working on trying to hit a lick, man, you gotta think of every angle, and that was one of the angles he thought of, like, look, man, we can't look like we might have been prepared just in case of disaster happened, because it's not a disaster, it's a plan. Yep. Was it one of those like like you said everybody was

doing it? Was this one of those like yeah, like worst kept secrets in the city, Like everybody knew, everybody the people that journalists right about it. Everyone knows this goes down because it's not like obviously none of these rich guys are admitting it, but it's not. Nobody. Nobody is. Yeah, nobody thinks this isn't happening. So this brings us to the fire. On March nineteen eleven, there were roughly six hundred workers in the Triangle factory in the late afternoon

when closing time came for the work day. The fire started at one of the cutting tables. Remember how I described these tables are basically giant fuel air bombs that people work at. Um the table had been prepped for the next day of work, which meanted it had a hundred and twenty layers of tissue, paper and fabric on top of it, and then hundreds of pounds of scraps

in the waist bin beneath it. Now, for obvious reasons, smoking was banned in the factory, but these cutters, remember the cutters are the most important part of the whole operation. These are some the only men working. They're they're the most highly paid workers. They're irreplaceable, right because Number one, the guys who were cutting from the big fabric swashed to make the things that people sew together. If they're good at their job, they waste less fabric, which saves

you money. If they're good at their job, they put out more stuff faster, which allows you to make more, which is so these guys. It's in no the owners band smoking in the factory. But also nobody wants to make these guys unhappy because they don't have to work here, then go elsewhere, right, they get that they can get money anywhere. Um So, as best as we can tell, so one of them was smoking. One of them smoked a cigaretteitor cigar, we don't really know, but he snuck

a smoke, which was very common. It had caused some minor fires before, um and they either tossed They either put out their match and tossed it in in the waste basket which is filled with hundreds of pounds of Coston backing and paper, or they tossed their cigarette button and they probably put it out first, but not all it would take is a single ember, you know, yeah, yeah, it may have just been that. It may have been

somebody put it out. They thought they were being careful, they tossed it in, and there's one little red ember the size of a fucking hair follicle, and that's what starts all this um and the what ever it is, it catches um and it fucking goes up like a

like it is a fire bomb, basically um. Now workers rushed to grab pails of water to put out the blaze, and honestly, like one of the big heroes of this is a guy who's who's initially attempts to stop the blaze and then helps rescue dozens of people, it's possible, as heroic as he was, that he got people killed because he tried to stop the fire rather than immediately focusing on a vactimation. Because by the time this thing starts,

it's fucked the only thing to do. And again, a lot of lives and I'm not blaming that guy, but a lot of lives would have been saved if they practiced evacuations, because that's the thing that you can't put this funker out once it starts. They don't have the equipment. Workers grab pails of water to try to put out the blaze. Some of them are empty, you'll hear um. But even if they hadn't been, I don't think it would have helped. Um. I'm gonna quote from a write

up and history dot Com here. The manager attempted to use the fire hose to extinguish it, but was unsuccessful as the hose was rotted and its valve was did shut. As the fire grew, panic and suit and the hose might have helped. The young workers tried to exit the building by the elevator, but it could hold only twelve people and the operator was able to make just four trips back and forth before it broke down amidst the

heat and flames. In a desperate attempt to escape the fire, the girls left behind waiting for the elevator plunged down the shaft to their deaths. The girls who fled via the stairwells also met awful demises when they found a locked door at the bottom of the stairs. Many were burned alive. They find dozens of bodies next to this door, just lay on, blumped together. Within eighteen minutes, it was all over forty nine workers had burned to death or

been suffocated by smoke. Thirty six were dead in the elevator shaft, and fifty eight died from jumping to the sidewalks, with two more later dying from their injuries. A total of a hundred and forty six people were killed by

the fire. Now Dave von Drelle goes into much more detail about the fire and the heroism of the people, Like these elevator attendants are incredibly brave because they're they're writing an elevator up into flames, licking at their heads to try and save as many people as they possibly they get stuck, Yeah, they could have gotten stuck on any one of those in burn Incredibly brave people. Um. There's a lot of very brave people. Um. Now, again, a big part of why so many people die is

that Blanc and Harris had locked the main exit. UM, so that because they their employees were getting ready to leave, they wanted to search them before they left to make sure nobody steaming ship. But maybe the bigger problem was the fire escape, which we've already talked about, didn't really work. So people flood to the fire escape, which is tiny and poorly constructed, and eventually it collapses and people fall to their doom. A lot of people get impaled. Oh god,

and you know, it's it's just horrible. In the weeks that followed the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire workers safety suddenly became a matter of paramount concern for union organizers and for the local government. They're is an outrage against this, Like a hundred thousand people take to the streets. There's mass demonstrations against this. People demand new fire safety codes

and more fire inspectors. In October of nineteen eleven, just months after the disaster, the United Association of Safety Engineers was founded. A fire prevention law was passed that same month which required all factories in New York City to install sprinkler systems in their buildings. Now, one of the people who had been passing by on the street at the time and have watched, didn't just see the fire, watched dozens of women leap to their deaths and splatter

on the fucking payment. One of the people who sees this is a woman named Francis Perkins. Francis Perkins, twenty years later or so, becomes the U S Secretary of Labor under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yeah. Perkins mentions the Triangle Fire constantly and the speeches she gives when she's made Secretary of Labor and repeatedly recalls the moment when she watches these women leap to their deaths to avoid burning alive. Quote from Francis, they couldn't hold on any longer. There

was no place to go. The fire was between them and any means of exit. It's that awful choice people talk of, what kind of choice to make. I shall never forget the frozen horror that came across as we stood with our hands on our throats, watching that horrible site, knowing there was no help. So this becomes this, This

is this is like her. She makes it her life quest to never be that helpless in the face of it as aster like this again, and as Secretary of Labor, Perkins establishes the Factory Investigating Commission, which lobbies for stronger safety measures and makes your factories are meeting certain minimum safety standards. She serves for twelve years, during which she is key informing and implementing not just reforms of safety, she helps push the Social Security Act through She helps

to create unemployment insurance. She pushes for the establishment of the minimum wage, and she legislates the Guarantee for the right of workers to organize and collectively bargain. Perkins also establishes the Labor Standards Bureau, which is focused on ensuring employees meet certain employers meet certain minimum safety standards. In nineteen seventy, the Labor Standards Bureau becomes Osha whoa. So that was just pivotal for her. Yeah, that, I mean,

this is the defining moment of her life in some ways. Obviously, how could you watch this and have it not be you know, yeah, yeah, I mean it could have went the opposite way where she could have, but for it to turn into activism is like many that's amazing. So of course, the sheer level of outrage around the fire ensured that there were immediate calls to charge Blanc and

Harris for manslaughter. Both tycoons immediately poured money into an advertising campaign dedicated to buffing their image as a safe and reliable garment manufacturer. Reporters from The New York Times met with Harris in his home and dutifully reported his defense of his actions and claims that he had taken proper precautions. None of this succeeded in assuaging public rage. On a for eleventh, both men were indicted for manslaughter.

Since most of the safety features their factory lacked were not mandated by law, the case came down to the question of whether or not they had legally locked the exits from a right up. In Forbes quote, Max Stewart, one of them top defense attorneys of his day, poked holes in the witnesses testimony and made it appear that a key witness's story had been rehearsed. On December, the all male jury returned a verdict of not guilty after

less than two hours of deliberation. Isaac Harris and Max Block dropped limply into their chairs as their wives began sobbing quietly just behind them, writes von Drelle in Triangle. Now the shirtwaist Kings had to like because these this, you know, is such an unpopular verdict. They have to sneak out of the courthouse to their limousine, and they get confronted by a young guy whose sister had died in the fire, who screams at them, basically yells at

them that they're murderers, which you could argue is accurate. Yeah. Now both guys immediately go on to try to rebuild the Triangle Shirtwaist company. Since even today a lot of people know the term Triangle Shirtwaist fire, even if they don't know what it was. This was kind of a lost cause, right Yea, the brand has been poisoned. Brands burned. Bro Yeah. Yeah. Harris and Blanc struggled financially as all of the funds they did make had to go straight

to the debt they had to their lawyer. Uh. They were sued in nineteen twelve over their failure to pay a two d and six dollar water bill. However, the tough times did not last long. Late in nineteen twelve, they get the insurance pay out from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Yeah, they collect a total of sixty thou dollars, which is a funkload of money in nineteen twelve and is more

than the fire had cost them in damages. Now they have to pay restitution to the families of the dead, but they just have to pay a week salary, which is like ten or fifteen bucks at most for most of these women. So they walk away from the fire because of the insurance pay out, they profit about four hundred dollars per victim. Oh oh, man, just say it like that. We made like four bucks per dead person.

It's just the Empire strikes back always. Yeah, baby, bro, you know it was avoidable disaster mhm ends up making you money, and these guys don't learn a goddamn thing. Of course, in nineteen, the next year, after they get their payment, Blanc, who's running another factory, is issued a warning from an inspector. Because now there's inspectors. So an inspector checks out this new Triangle factory and it finds that he's locked the door of the factory again during

work hours. Now the thing that he successfully got off on in court, he's caught doing again the same thing. So the Triangle factory burned. Now you got the Parallelogram factory, and he locked the door again because I mean I did. It's like it kind of sucks for a little bit,

but we kind of make spinning guys. It doesn't find twenty dollars for this, so yeah, yeah, it's like yeah, you know, yeah, And a couple of months after that he's he's fined again when another factory inspector finds that he's he's lined the walls with scrap baskets that basically make the whole thing a death traffic because the bomb. So yeah, yeah that does it again? Does it again? What's that thing with Ford? The uh the the car

everybody used to make fun of. Uh, But yeah, the Pento that like when they where they put the gas where they put the gas tank was means like it's gonna become a bomb. And the FOD decided it's just cheaper to just pay whatever fine lines if people die, rather than reclaim them and remake them all. I forget what that was called, but there's a term for it. But that's what this reminds me of. Where it's like, I mean, it's cheaper to just pay the fine than

to like make the factory safe. Absolutely, yeah, that's wild, guy, it's pretty great. It's pretty great. In nineteen fourteen, both Harris and Blanc were fined when they were caught sewing fake Consumers League labels into their garments. Now, these legal labels where a legacy of the Triangle Fire. They were meant to certify that a factory had safe conditions for its laborers. So obviously everyone gets horrified by unsafe work conditions.

They developed this way to show that, like, your factory is safe, and these guys fake having that label so they can't pretend there say yeah, yeah, there is nothing dude, like how many times you picked up something like is this organic? Is this grassbit? Yeah? Look it's on the label. Yeah. And now in nineteen eighteen, though they do finally shut down the Triangle Company, it just never makes as much

money as it had before for obvious reasons. Isaac Harris goes back to working as a tailor and Blanc continues to own other garment factories. Neither of them pay anything that we could we would reasonably call a price for what they've done. Show so good time, somebody, Hey, I think the lesson here is that cheating cheaters prosper. That's

the lesson. Cheaters do fucking great, cheaters make out like Gangbusters. Cheaters. Uh. So, you know, if you want to learn anything useful from this, just remember to lock the factory door in the fire hazard of a garment factory in your life, whatever that is for you, lock that door, make sure the fire escape isn't function and all you know, yeah, to make no efforts make no efforts to show that you're trying, because because if you show that you're trying, that means

you're cheating. Yeah, if you're trying, you're guilty. Yes, you got it. This is a disaster. And that's my motto. M hmm. Don't try because trying means you're guilty. Well, prop, that's gonna do it for us behind the bastards today. How are you? How are you doing? I am that same sinking feeling that every guest has at the end of a show to where you're like, man, I'm glad

I got through that. Now I have to think about this for the next until I go to bed that like, this is true, but I had a great time hanging which all it's just it's kind of it's it's a whole mess, man. Mm hmm. It is a whole mess. Welcome, there's got to be you know, it's not a mess. Prop You're not doing. There's no ad right now. It's not a mess. Is your podcast politics? Oh? I was like, wait, are we going to an ad break at the end? Yeah?

Club politics were prop man. Man, I like, I'm so excited about being able to like have a consistent, like flow of content that like now, I'm getting so far ahead of myself. So like some of the stuff I'm talking about right now ain't gonna come out until, uh, you know, three weeks from now. So I'm like, crap, dude, how do I stay hot? You know? But man Hood Politics were prop got some great episodes in the can Um.

We're covering everything like Joe Biden's from Long Beach, uh, the Israel and Palestine, Armenian genocide, like what it means for to be a foreign ally, like everything. It's all coming. So check it out. It's a weekly as You're welcome, Yes it is. It's a podcast as regular as garment fires in early nineteen hundreds of New York and old tiny guys that always make it out on top. Yeah, always always handle it, and hiring gangsters and prostitutes to

beat up workers. American way. I do want that TV show. I was gonna say, that has to be that has to be a show. Yeah, there has to be some character in that that like where the lady was getting getting her ass beat by its prostitute and she comes up with the idea of like maybe I should just maybe I should quit this factory thing and become a prostitute, like and she just like switches sides because she's like so well, we uh. I wrote a book. It's called

After the Revolution. You can find the podcast version of that book with sound effects by our own danial Uh. If you if you type after the Revolution into whatever fucking thing your podcast come the funk from um. That's really good. I'm excited about that, man's yeh. I mean the book it's really good, and the podcast is really good and Robert's really good, so should be exciting. You can also find you can find the pub for free online. Okay,

just got breaks into a yawn. I was about I was about to, like, let me tell you something, man, because you know I'm I'm publishing a book too, and like as good as you are, Like I thought about, man, just like the way that you guys as well as y'all right, and the way that y'all tore up Ben Shapiro's book. I was thinking about that as I was writing my own and be like, let me make sure I don't get dragged by the homies for me right

in the state. Now. Granted, I mean definitely not as bad as that, but there's all every book anyone's if written has dragon ball things. But I think it really makes you dragon bles being been Shapiro. Yeah yeah, yeah, you kind of you kind of came with you, thankfully, very not to the best of my knowledge. Um, you always buy two boards when you go to the home depot. That's the funniest thing I've seen. I'm gonna support him. I was like, Bam, you spent a dollar fit. Yeah,

that's like that's like you could. You would have given them more money if you'd bought a diet coke, Like, come on, buddy, bro, this is your point. Like, yeah, also, you're a millionaire, get like an angle grinder or a fucking circular saw or something by a power. He doesn't, but like you're trying to pretend to be cool. What are you doing? It was just so funny because I'm like, you're making this huge political statement and you show me that little lass bag in your hands, and I was like, wait,

is that what he bought? I thought? I thought, I'm like, are you making fun of yourself? Like do you are you in on the joke? Like are you in on the joke? Because your whole thing is supposed to be like we're the party of the honest working man. That's who I represents. Like I've spent a lot of time in home depots, Like you know, I've spent a shipload of time. I'm not particularly handy, but people very close

to me do that ship for a living. I've spent a lot of time doing runs for like like functioning farms and stuff. Nobody who's a serious, working class person who needs to go there walks out with a paper back, with a plastic bag and a single piece of work, Like you're a millionaire, buy a power tool and at least like try to pretend like cool, like yeah, I got a giant saw, Like go get a go get a fucking Husk Varner or something, and yeah, yeah, yeah, my uncle's been you in the same saw for the

for you know, fifty years. I'm gonna buy him a brand new so I'm gonna go to home depot. I just put him. Me and my brother in law just put in a new sink in my office. Uh. And like, speaking of going to the store, I'm like, first of all, you're gonna go at least four times, because at least there's no one trip to home depot. You know what makes one trip like, damn, this don't work. Oh my god, now this is leaking. This is the wrong fucking size. Like you're gonna make four trips and I did, and

I'm like putting in the sink. I'm like, I know, I spent just on return trips, hunts, you know what I'm saying. So I'm like, don't tell bro, that's so hilarious. It's like, there's an easy way. You've been Shapiro, right, Your your big thing is dying climate change. Be like we're saying it's not a problem. Be like, well, there's fires, and since I'm not a weak liberal, I'm just gonna fire proof my house and I'm gonna go cut down the tree in my yard so it can't catch, because

that's what real conservative meant do. And then go buy a giant chainsaw, put it in your fucking garage, forget about it, and hire someone else to do the work. You're Ben Shapiro, You're a millionaire, Like what ye pretend? At least this has been a fun digression about Ben Shapiro. After an hour and forty minutes of talking about the triangle shirtwaist fire anyway politics, yea, it will see you

pull later don't listen to Ben Shapiro. Although this episode is dropping the same week as the last of the Ben's Books episode, so I guess it fits. Fuck it a great plug for Thursdays. That nailed it all right, Peace, Oh my god.