Great conversation about all this today - and yes, there was a huge turnout this morning at the commemoration! It was great to hear voices from the Triangle Fire Open Archive on air - thanks for featuring the project! The Archive is always open for new contributions, so if you've got a Triangle fire or labor story to tell, we invite you to participate : http://rememberthetrianglefire.org/open-archive/

And the result of 100 years of unionism is almost all the "good" union jobs have fled overseas where new generations of workers are abused. This happened with the help of the Democratic pols, especially Bill Clinton, that the unions had been paying off for generations. Libs are good at sabotaging their own interests. Congrats.

if you are going to point out the religion of the workers and the fact that they were working on the sabbath, why not also mention the religion of the owners?

The commemoration of this tragic event is being abused by leftist, unionists and their leftist friends in the media (all over the country) due to the push back by taxpayers against greedy and corrupt government employee unions that are bankrupting the public treasuries of every jurisdiction of this nation.

These women changed Tammany Hall more than any political movement of the time. Tammany cronnies saw all the Voters who showed up for the funeral procession (in the rain) and that's when Regulations began to be passed. Regulations!

I took a Women's history class while I was an undergrad at NYU. One day of the class was dedicated to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. After the professor was done telling us the story she explained that the fire had happened in the very building we were sitting in. It was a very moving lesson.

The deaths of the Triangle Shirtwaister workers "sparked nationwide debate on workers' rights": but they had themselves tried to spark that very debate earlier that year, when they bravely faced financial difficulty when they went on a general worker's strike along with many other shirtwaist workers. The Triangle workers were among those that had to go back to work without becoming unionized, their bosses being bitterly opposed to unions. If you want to pursue the "spark" metaphor in a sad way, you could say they were almost literally burnt sacrifices to their cause. It's important to remember that women did not have the vote yet, and their strike was considered "unnatural" and antisocial, besides their not being taken seriously for being women. Only this tragic fire was enough to finally wake people from their prejudices. The Triangle fire is a monument in women's rights history as well as worker's rights.