What the Triangle Shirtwaist fire means for workers now

Below is a reprint from The Washington Post of an op-ed piece by Hilda Solis, our Secretary Of Labor on March 18, 2011.  I had the good fortune to hear her speak at the 100th anniversary commemoration of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire of March 25, 1911.  This fire was a watershed moment for trade unionism.  From this tragedy, which killed 146 known victims, many of the benefits and labor practices that we take for granted sprang.  Frances Perkins, who watched the fire in horror said later, after retiring as FDR's Secretary Of Labor, that "the New Deal began on March 25, 1011."  We're lucky to have a Secretary like Hilda Solis.

What the Triangle Shirtwaist fire means for workers now 
By Hilda L. Solis, Friday, March 18, 8:35 PM
 
A century ago this week, in Lower Manhattan, a young social worker named Frances Perkins was having tea at the Greenwich Village townhouse of her friend, the socialite Margaret Morgan Norrie. They were interrupted by clanging fire truck bells. Then they heard the anguished screams: “Don’t jump!”

They raced out of the townhouse and ran toward the commotion: a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, just off Washington Square. Flames and black smoke shot from the top floors, and as they watched in shock, young girls and women, some alone, some clutching hands, inched up to the windows’ ledges — and jumped to their deaths.

Perkins would describe the scene in lectures later: “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?” She added: “I shall never forget the frozen horror that came across as we stood with our hands on our throats watching that horrible sight, knowing that there was no help.”

The sewing factory employed more than 500 people, who worked long hours for low wages, in wretched and unsanitary conditions. They turned out “shirtwaists” — blouses with puffed sleeves and tight bodices popularized by the “Gibson Girl.” The factory owners had locked the fire-escape doors. The seamstresses were trapped when fire raced through the sweatshop just before closing on March 25, 1911.

In less than 20 minutes, 146 people, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls, were dead. The last six victims were officially identified just a few weeks ago. Triangle outraged the public and offered a grisly example of how powerless workers were without collective bargaining, because unionized garment workers received better pay and had safer conditions. And it galvanized Frances Perkins.

Twenty-two years later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her secretary of labor, the first woman to serve as a Cabinet secretary. During her 12-year tenure, she directed the formulation and implementation of the Social Security Act, one of the most important pieces of social legislation in our history. Among other extraordinary accomplishments, she helped create unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, and the legislation that guarantees the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. She also established the department’s Labor Standards Bureau, a precursor to what is now the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Perkins clearly had the Triangle victims in mind as she weaved the nation’s social safety net.

Now I have the same job she once held, with the responsibility of repairing and strengthening that net. And although our passion for workers’ rights came from different paths (she was the daughter of privilege; I am the daughter of immigrant union members), I understand the impact that moment had on her work.

I had my own moment involving a sweatshop. Although it was not as horrifying as that afternoon was for Perkins, it fueled my beliefs. In 1995, 75 Thai immigrants were freed from a so-called factory in the city of El Monte, Calif., part of the district I represented in the state Senate. They had been forced to eat, sleep and work in a place they called home.

Their employer confiscated their passports and kept them like slaves. Threatened with violence to themselves or their families, the workers hunched over sewing machines in dimly lit garages bound by barbed wire, sewing brand-name clothing for less than $2 an hour. Most of them were women.

I met them shortly after they were freed and heard their stories. And at that moment, the unthinkable became real for me. I had assumed that sweatshops were a thing of the past. But they had just spread — from Perkins’s New York City to my Los Angeles, from the Italian and Eastern European immigrants victimized in her day to the Asian and Latino immigrants victimized in mine.

Combating garment sweatshops is, sadly, still on the labor secretary’s agenda. In the past fiscal year, the department’s Wage and Hour division conducted 374 investigations and collected $2.1 million for 2,215 workers, primarily in the major U.S. garment centers of Southern California and New York. In these cases, vulnerable immigrant workers have been deprived of minimum-wage pay, overtime pay and safe working conditions — all the haunting echoes of Triangle.

We have had many improvements in the past century. Today, we have more tools to pursue violators who deny workers their pay, including issuing subpoenas and preventing companies from shipping goods produced in violation of the law.

In 1911, more than 100 workers were estimated to have died on the job each day. In 2010, 4,340 workers were killed on the job — and more than 3.3 million were seriously injured. Last April 5, in a fiery explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, 29 miners died in one day.

I was at the mine the next day, while rescue efforts still were underway.

In times of crisis, one often becomes two people. In one sense, I was simply Hilda, the person I’ve always been, there just to be by the family members’ sides as they kept vigil. In another sense, I was Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis, trying to convey to them the depth of their government’s commitment. In either case, no words can adequately express your emotion and sympathy. A grief that great can be endured only if it is shared — and then acted upon in good time.

Both Triangle and Upper Big Branch became calls to action. New York quickly implemented groundbreaking workplace safety laws and regulations, including fire exits. But nearly one year after Upper Big Branch, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, part of the Labor Department, still needs additional tools that only Congress can provide. And OSHA needs better tools, such as stricter penalties against employers who put their workers’ lives at risk, and stronger protections for whistle-blowers.

In both cases, if these workers had a voice — a union — and the ability to speak up about conditions, these events probably could have been prevented, because unions play an important role in making workplaces safer. In both cases, they had tried to organize and faced virulent opposition.

Today, workers and their allies are being met with that same kind of opposition. In states nationwide, working people are protesting the actions to strip them of collective bargaining. The Triangle fire and the Upper Big Branch explosion a century later make clear to me that workers want and need that voice — about wages and benefits, yes, but about more, too. Collective bargaining still means a seat at the table to discuss issues such as working conditions, workplace safety and workplace innovation, empowering individuals to do the best job they can. And it means dignity and a chance for Americans to earn a better life, whether they work in sewing factories or mines, build tall buildings or care for our neighbors, teach our children, or run into burning buildings when others run out of them.

I’ll be thinking about all of this as I make my way to New York on Friday for the 100th anniversary of the Triangle factory tragedy. The building is still there; it now houses offices for New York University. Thousands are expected to mark the occasion with a march, speeches, the reading of the victims’ names and the laying of flowers in their honor at the site by schoolchildren. It will be a powerful reminder of what we’ve lived through, and what we still have to do.

History is an extraordinary thing. You can choose to learn from it, or you can choose to repeat it.

For me, the choice is clear, as it was for Frances Perkins. We must always be a nation that catches workers before they fall.

Unions - The Villain of the Day

Recently an article on the AFL-CIO blog called, The Shameful Attack On Public Employees caught my interest .

As anyone who pays attention knows, every state in the union is in financial crisis.  Ask anyone how to fix a state's budget and there will come many strategies - many of which involve gutting union entitlements.  Indeed, the very word, entitlement elicits an emotional reflex.  A person with a "sense of entitlement" of course, evokes the image of a carping, narcissistic glutton, with coat-of-arms: the whip, the crown and the diaper.  There are many (including some union officials, mind) who willingly scapegoat union contracts as being out-of-date and out of sych with today's culture and economy.  A relic of a bygone era.

"While the rest of the country struggles," goes the canard, "union members enjoy a soft, cradle-to-grave cushy life."  It is easy to find those who weigh their own work life with that of the union member, and carp about inequities.  As a union leader, I am often assailed by anti-trade unionists with the following example: "Why should a guy get [fill in dollar amount] an hour for [fill in job] when I [fill in job] get half that and have no benefits? 

The trouble with the conversation is that is it is backwards.

As was stated in a recent front page story in the New York Times:
"A raft of recent studies found that public salaries, even with benefits included, are equivalent to or lag slightly behind those of private sector workers. The Manhattan Institute, which is not terribly sympathetic to unions, studied New Jersey and concluded that teachers earned wages roughly comparable to people in the private sector with a similar education."

"Vu iz geschriben," as they say in Yiddish - Where is it written that the person who [fill in job] does not deserve whatever he or she is earning?  Those who have trouble with this specific example fall into two groups: 1) Those who envy the union member's seemingly great deal and 2) Employers.

I can not help hearing the reverberations of the Candy Incident of 1963.  If you remember: Central Park Playground.  Summer.  Near the sandbox.  Johnny, on seeing that he had not as much candy as Elsie, screamed his ever-lovin' toe-headed head off.  Being a union member, I have joined with others who do the same work I do, to come to an agreement with our employers as to not only how much money we get, but clean and safe working conditions.  Also, in the eventuality that I am too old or sick to work, me and my brothers and sisters have given up rightful and fair salary increases to guarantee that.

When organizing, we often hear complaints from actors who don't want to join a union.  Usually there is something about freedom (like in those right-to-work-for-less states) and the fact that unions ignore realities about the economy and demand what is not fiscally possible.  Having been at the negotiating table myself, I can tell you that we don't go in without full knowledge of the economy and the business models of our employers.

We simply demand what is right and fair.

Another reason for flying alone, without union protection, is usually that an actor can "work more."  Yes, you might do more shows than a union actor in a season, but you also will work for lower pay, no benefits and no redress for grievances than your union counterpart.  And hour for hour, you will probably get a third of what I get in salary. 


In a way there is a self-satisfied feeling I get when I hear all this complaining.  Wanna know why I joined a union?  This is why.

Take our benefits that we have worked for all these years?  Like hell!

My friend, the producer

[originally published 2008]


Many of us have a theatre from which we receive regular employment. Some of these regional theatres exist only because an actor or group of actors decided to make their own work, instead of relying solely on freelance employment. They don't fit the image of the evil blood-sucking producer that Equity was formed to deal with. They have titles like, "artistic director," "managing director," "producing artistic director," or other compound titles too numerous to enumerate.
I have a few theatres where I am a regular. The bosses of these theatres often have another title, at least as far as I am concerned, and that is: friend. Equity contracts give us a virtual armor that ensures that we have no dealings at all, so far as labor disputes are concerned, with management. "Familiarity," as the old saw goes, can "breed contempt."
I was deputy on a show where the artistic director, who was also acting on the stage with me announced, at half-hour, that there would be a video tape available of that night's performance and pointed to the camera in the balcony. The company looked at me, furtively, and then at the floor. I was in a quandary. One the one hand, I had a responsibility to make sure that the rule against taping was enforced, as per our contract. On the other, here was a man at whose wedding I gave a toast, and in whose house I was a frequent guest. Even if I went by the book and put the grievance through the stage manager, there would not be the normal anonymity of the Equity deputy. I was on the spot. I wasn't the only one. Everyone in the company had had a big sandbag of angst dropped on top of their heads, right before a show.
I took my friend/boss aside and said, "You know you're putting me in an awful situation."
"Oh, crap! You're not going to go all Equity on me now, are you?" he said.
I told him that even if he thought that our long friendship allowed him to presume that he could cause me to break the rules, that was one thing. But I was the company's deputy, and there were 6 other actors and a stage manager with whom I had only a three week relationship, and anyway, our long friendship had nothing to do with the contracts that they had all signed.
What could I do? I called an emergency meeting of the company (minus the artistic director, of course). I said that we were going to hold an illegal vote. I said that no provision in the contracts that we had signed allows us to vote away anything therein.
"There are two issues," I said, "One - whether to allow the taping or not. And, two - whether to turn the artistic director in to Equity for whatever action may be warranted."
This was all anyone needed right before a performance.
I continued, "This will have to be a unanimous vote. I know that if it goes one way, there is the possibility of retribution in the from of, 'You'll never work here again,' but this was thrown in our laps and we have to deal with this, and unless anyone has a better plan of action, let's vote on the first part now."
There was silence, so I handed out slips of paper. Everyone scribbled, folded and threw their ballots into a hat. It was unanimous. No taping.
The second ballot came back unanimously: no. There was to be no disciplinary action requested from the union against the producer.
Well, my friend the producer, was hopping mad that night. He was very vocal about how mad he was, too. I think they heard him in the lobby. He had to cancel a taping that he had paid a good chunk of money for and I am sure that it was non-refundable. That night's performance was not the most focused of the run. Some say the show never really recovered. We have stayed nominally friends, this artistic director and me, although the taping fracas cooled things considerably for a long time. I have not worked in his theatre since, though. Our friendship is such that I even mention the taping incident as the reason he hasn't had me back to his "rat-trap of a theatre." He says, jokingly that of course it is.
"That -and your lousy acting," he snipes, "But also there has not been a role available for you."
Has there been retribution for following the rules? I can't say with unwavering certainty. Would that vote have had the same outcome if we weren't united as a union? I doubt it. Human nature being what it is, despite the fact that I am a big union guy up and down the line, there is part of me that does not want to cause trouble and honestly, feared losing a possible source of future employment. My union brothers and sisters gave me the strength I didn't have on my own. (Thanks. You know who you are)

 

JJ and Lee Shubert

Respect For Acting

[originally published 2008]

Perhaps you recognize the above-quoted subject heading as the title of Uta Hagen's famous book on acting. A few years ago, in the green room of a well-respected LORT theatre, I sat with some fellow thesps, sipping coffee - all of us on our Equity ten. This one actor, as well respected as the theatre in which we were working, was explaining the path that his life had taken. He had married a woman - not in our business - who has, for a long time held a lucrative position in a university.

"My wife's job allows me to act. Thank God she's got a REAL job."
Taking umbrage, I said, "I consider THIS a real job!"
My co-worker sniffed and shot back, seemingly conspiratorially, "Well, you know what I mean."
"Yes," I replied, "I DO know what you mean. And THAT'S the problem"

It's bad enough that civilians, on hearing what we do, say, "From that you make a living?!" or, "What do you REALLY do?"

But often we don't get the respect that we deserve from fellow theatre artists, either. Worse still, we don't value ourselves.

Degrees of respect in our society are many times quantified based on an (assumed) income level. I didn't get into show business to make money, but I am like a not-for-profit organization: making a profit is not my primary goal - but it is a goal, nonetheless. One of the hallmarks of our art is that, at its best it looks effortless. You and I know what an artificiality that is.

A not-yet-famous Mick Jagger once said, "I play concerts for free. It's getting to play's what I gets paid for."

I always say that what I do is like being a life insurance salesman. I try to sell new policies to people and try to get past customers to buy more. Glamorous, no? No one has to tell you how much work you put into your career. You know the sacrifices; the training; the effort of presentation; the enuring of oneself the word, 'no.' But then, the show itself makes one almost forget what one had to do to get there.

It's an inside job, and we have to value ourselves first if we want to have that value respected in the marketplace.