On March twenty-five in the year of nineteen-eleven, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing one hundred forty-five workers. It is evoked as one of the most shocking incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were broadly preventable–most of the victims died as a result of neglected safety appearance and locked doors within the factory building. The failure brought widespread attention to the dangerous sweatshop surroundings of factories and attend to the increase of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of workers.
It was a true sweatshop, employing young immigrant women who worked in a crowded space at lines of sewing machines. Nearly all the workers were teenaged girls who did not speak English, working twelve hours a day, every day. And four elevators with connections to the factory floors, but only one was totally working and the workers had to file down a long, tight corridor in order to reach it.