Did Y'all Miss MY Understated Point?

[The Triangle fire laid bare a reallocation of risk that had previously accompanied revisions in corporate structures. New laws limited the liability of stockholders for corporate debts, spurring investment and making it possible for firms to raise more capital and expand. Corporations also successfully claimed to be "legal persons" and gained access to some Bill of Rights' protections originally written with human persons in mind. These legal innovations reduced the risks of doing business for owners and investors. Firms expanded exponentially, and a merger movement ensued, giving us our first modern megastructures, such as US Steel and American Tobacco.

Workers increasingly gained employment in these giant companies, but no similar legal structure protected them from the risks of business. Wages flattened as monopolies decreased competition for workers, and industrial accidents increased, as owners had great incentive to push workers but had little motivation to invest in safety measures.

The owner of the Triangle factory had broken no laws in locking women into their workrooms, for no regulations existed. In effect, the legal imbalance shifted risk downward so that investors enjoyed protection while workers experienced heightened economic and bodily dangers.]  emphasis added

http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/118617619.html

Eyewitness account of a United Press reporter who happened to be in Washington Square on March 25, 1911

[The nation learned of the horrible fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company through the eyewitness account of a United Press reporter who happened to be in Washington Square on March 25, 1911. He phoned in details while watching the tragedy unfold. At the other end of the telephone, young Roy Howard telegraphed Shepherd's story to the nation's newspapers. This document first published in the Milwaukee Journal, March 27, 1911.

I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from the factory building caught my eye. I reached the building before the alarm was turned in. I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. I learned a new sound--a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk.

Thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead. Sixty-two thud-deads. I call them that, because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time, at the same instant. There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down. The height was eighty feet.

The first ten thud-deads shocked me. I looked up-saw that there were scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the floor below were beating in their faces. Somehow I knew that they, too, must come down, and something within me-something that I didn't know was there-steeled me.

I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud--then a silent, unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs.

As I reached the scene of the fire, a cloud of smoke hung over the building. . . . I looked up to the seventh floor. There was a living picture in each window-four screaming heads of girls waving their arms.

"Call the firemen," they screamed-scores of them. "Get a ladder," cried others. They were all as alive and whole and sound as were we who stood on the sidewalk. I couldn't help thinking of that. We cried to them not to jump. We heard the siren of a fire engine in the distance. The other sirens sounded from several directions.]

http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/primary/testimonials/ootss_WilliamShepherd.html?location=Fire!

Oh, Jesus, Why Did I See Pictures of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire?

Please. You could have let me go my whole life without seeing these pictures of aftermath of Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire..

Reading 1911 accounts of girls deciding to jump to their deaths troubled me enough to blog and bring up righteous indignation supporting unions.

Thumbnail of faulty fire escapes from Library of Congress, link below.

But the pictures brought bile, rage, and even tears.

Sober tears, even, as among these could have numbered my nieces in earlier times, my dear and still sweet 15 and 18 year old nieces.

To think the factory owners collected more $ in an insurance settlement than they paid out in civil settlements boggles my mind beggars the imagination, and buggers all thoughts of responsible capitalists working with government regulators to make the world a better place.

Fie on that in FL, where governor 48.9% wants to abolish ability of humans raped or killed in FL privatized state programs run by a not for profit company--although sure looks like top administrators make out like bandits at One Kid while real kids die.

[Miami-Dade’s 5-year-old privately run child welfare agency is paid $100 million each year to protect thousands of abused and neglected children. But in recent months, it has been forced to defend itself.

Last summer, several children’s advocates became incensed when Our Kids, a private contractor that oversees foster care and adoption in Miami-Dade and Monroe, paid more than $330,000 in employee bonuses – some totaling five figures – at the same time it cut the stipend given to newly aged-out foster kids by $300.]

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/03/25/2133051/private-child-welfare-agency-under.html#ixzz1HyBzYmr1
Pictures found at excellent Fox Business News story.

[Fined $20

A year later, in 1913, Blanck, would be fined just $20 for locking the doors to another factory.
The owners lost a civil suit in 1913, but they paid only about $75 per victim. Later, they got an insurance check for $60,000 more than they had reported as losses -- the two owners earned about $411 per victim. The factory soon went out of business.

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/03/23/triangle-shirtwaist-factory/#ixzz1Hx4CRSWH]
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/03/23/triangle-shirtwaist-factory/?test=faces

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/related/?fi=subject&q=Triangle%20Shirtwaist%20Company--Disasters--1910-1920.

http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/index.html