The journey to Joe Biden’s presidency and its meaning for workers began on March 25, 1911, when a young social worker in Manhattan, Frances Perkins, heard sirens and screams and raced to a tragic scene.
What she saw that sunny afternoon was the horrifying fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, an eighth-floor sweatshop employing young immigrant workers, toiling for pennies a day in a closed room with flammable materials all around.
The owners, upper class white men, had locked the fire doors, allegedly to prevent “theft” by the woman workers they vastly underpaid.
Nobody knows how the fire began. But in the crowded conditions of the sweatshop, with rags and swatches of garments abounding, it spread rapidly. The fire truck ladders of 1911 couldn’t reach the women trapped the building. Nor could the hoses.
As the firefighters and the crowd, including Perkins, watched helplessly, the workers, mostly women, screamed, prayed—and jumped.
One hundred and twenty-three women and 23 men died. Some were burned to death. Others were asphyxiated. But most jumped, hit the sidewalk below and died. The Triangle owners? They eventually walked away with no penalty at all.
And the social conscience of Frances Perkins caught fire, too. The pro-worker legislation and regulations that flowed from her activism and drive, starting in New York and eventually becoming FDR’s New Deal and—in its tradition—Joe Biden’s pro-worker, pro-union presidency, was and is the result, as Biden acknowledged in a December 16 ceremony.
Fire codes. Job safety and health rules. Workers comp. The minimum wage. Overtime pay. Unemployment benefits. Social Security. And, of course, the National Labor Relations Act.
All were part of the New Deal which Perkins goaded Roosevelt to push through a sometimes-balky Congress. Some measures, such as the fire codes, she pushed through the New York legislature in the immediate years after Triangle.
There’s a direct line from Triangle to Perkins, FDR’s first and only Secretary of Labor, serving all 12-plus years of FDR’s time in office, and as the Cabinet’s first-ever woman. And from FDR to Biden, whose initiatives to pull the nation out of the coronavirus-caused depression included some leftovers, such as help for child care, from the New Deal.
After all, Biden, born in November 1942, is in all likelihood the last U.S. president who was alive under FDR. FDR and Frances Perkins had already been serving for nine and a half years.
And, so, too, was a large part of the militancy, and later political activism, of both the union movement, via the International Ladies Garment Workers Union—which almost literally sprang from the Triangle tragedy--and the women’s movement.
Which is why it was very fitting that Biden came to the Labor Department,...
