There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Injured workers might be cared for in union hospitals or compensated by brotherhood funds, or even by irregular funds kept for such purposes by employers, but lawsuits seeking substantial awards had the challenge of proving employer negligence. This was extremely difficult, as potential witnesses to an accident were usually themselves employees and were often intimidated by the prospect of testifying against those who paid their wages. In addition, many injuries occurred due to reasons of worker fatigue or inadequate safety precautions on the shop floor; while this might indict management for maintaining excessive work schedules or allowing unsafe conditions, it often did not meet the higher standard of negligence.

  As a result of the revolution in Progressive thinking about the limits of an individual’s ability to ward off misfortune, workers’ compensation came more fully into its own in the early years of the twentieth century. American social scientists had gone on a fact-finding mission to Europe to investigate national workers’ compensation models already in use there, primarily one introduced in Prussia in 1884 by Prince Otto von Bismarck; back home, a 1907–1908 study in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, known as “The Pittsburgh Survey” and published initially in Collier’s, examined the whole scope of industrial workplace accidents, focusing on their short- and long-term impact on families. It concluded that most injuries could be linked to some environmental factor within the workplace caused by employer disregard, and even where employers responded sympathetically to the plight of injured workers, it was the survivors and their families who suffered the lasting emotional and financial burdens. President Roosevelt had echoed reformers in urging the passage of state workers’ compensation laws, and eventually industry had lent its support as well, attracted by the idea that such programs would allow it to manage its liability as a cost of doing business, minimizing individual injury lawsuits that could be both expensive and ruinous to a business’s reputation.96 Led by Wisconsin, twenty-five states enacted such laws between 1911 and 1921, although labor frowned on the condition that employees covered by the laws had to forfeit their right to sue for damages, and expressed concern that the system, by allowing employers to amortize the financial risks of worker injuries, would not be motivated to improve factory safety. This drawback would be addressed only in the 1930s, when states adopted “experience rating” for workers’ compensation insurance, meaning an employer’s insurance tab would rise with every accident.

  The toll of workplace suffering has always been something of a hidden detail of the American work experience, but never more so than in the years 1880–1910, when as many as ten thousand to fifteen thousand American workers a year perished in on-site accidents, with thousands more injured or sickened, mostly in connection with mine and railroad work. Rail travel today is the nation’s safest mode of transportation, but in the nineteenth century, before the coming of uniform codes regarding track gauges, switches, and the introduction of the Westinghouse air brake, it was highly dangerous to both passenger and workman alike. Derailments, collisions, trestle fires, and boiler explosions all contributed to a staggering death toll. In 1889 alone, 8,500 U.S. trainmen were killed on the job; in 1895, 6,450; in 1901, 7,350. Mining accidents—everything from explosions and cave-ins to flash underground fires and poison fumes—claimed almost six thousand men per year between 1890 and 1894, and an average of sixty-six hundred each year between 1900 and 1904. Pittsburgh steel mills also proved dangerous, with as many as three hundred workers killed and two thousand hurt on the job annually during the 1890s.97

  The first minimal efforts toward worker safety had come in 1867 in Massachusetts, where factory inspections were mandated by law. A decade later the state passed the nation’s first specific workplace safety regulations, insisting that guards be installed on textile mill spinning devices to keep women’s and children’s hands and hair from getting entangled. Several other states followed suit, although enforcement was shoddy, mostly due to the failure of legislatures to provide funding to support the policing of the regulations. Manufacturers, meanwhile, often found ways to bar inspectors from entering their premises, while business-friendly legislators hindered progress by warning that if safety enforcement was too draconian, it would drive free enterprise into neighboring states that had fewer rules.

  Another, more nuanced, management reaction was to co-opt the issue of safety. In 1913 employers, following the lead of U.S. Steel president Elbert Gary, whose industry had been criticized for lax safety standards, founded the National Safety Council (NSC). Its self-appointed mission was to educate workers and the public on workplace (and later home and traffic) safety, but the chief effect of its efforts was to ensure that the onus for job safety and health issues remained with the employee. No representatives of labor were consulted by the NSC or included on its boards. This “blame the victim” approach used posters and brochures to emphasize the risks of worker carelessness, such as putting one’s hands inside machinery or leaving buckets where they might be tripped over. The subtext of these NSC campaigns was that employers could maintain a safe factory by reminding workers to be careful and regulating their behavior, making actual government regulations unnecessary.98

  NEW YORK STATE HAD BEEN UNABLE to prove criminal neglect on the part of the owners of Triangle Shirtwaist, but it was clear even before the acquittals of Harris and Blanck that the real culprit had been the absence of enforceable factory safety measures. The consensus for immediate action to reform factory safety rose at once, and as often occurs after tragedies of such magnitude, objections to reform suddenly appeared trivial and small-minded, even heartless. Signing on to the effort were leading New York City reformers and labor activists, including a petite, outspoken New Englander named Frances Perkins, who ran the New York office of the National Consumers League and had witnessed Triangle’s devastation firsthand. Visiting a friend for tea in nearby Washington Square the afternoon of the fire, she had suddenly seen through a window a black plume of smoke rise above the trees of the square, and raced to the scene as victims were beginning to leap from the high ledges of the Asch Building. Perkins was also in the audience at the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2 to hear the “little red-headed girl … [with] blazing eyes and pretty too,” Rose Schneiderman,99 dismiss as inadequate the pieties of liberal reformers. Schneiderman had called on the masses to challenge the sweatshop system and its dangers; Perkins’s experience, however, told her it was up to government to transform the modern factory. From her work with the Consumers League, she knew that unions and employers were almost intrinsically incapable of resolving matters related to health and safety.

  Perkins was a veteran of the settlement house movement, having worked at Hull House in Chicago, one of the first of approximately four hundred settlement houses that opened in America by the early years of the twentieth century. She went on to serve as general secretary of a Philadelphia organization that sought to disrupt prostitution rings in that city, educating and protecting the vulnerable young women on whom the rings preyed, before moving in 1909 to New York’s Greenwich Village. There she befriended the writers John Reed and Sinclair Lewis as well as a young, ambitious city official named Robert Moses, and became active in the suffrage movement, briefly joining that issue’s corps of soapbox orators.

  She soon found a calling and a role model in Florence Kelley, the dynamic Quaker attorney and reformer who had written the legislation that in 1893 created the Illinois State Factory Inspection agency, one of the nation’s first. Illinois’s early devotion to industrial health and safety stemmed from its strong tradition of urban reform as embodied in its governors John Peter Altgeld and Charles S. Deneen, the presence of a militant core of Progressives in Chicago, and the city’s status as a major rail crossroads and hub of the nation’s food distribution system. It was after touring the Chicago packinghouses that muckraker Upton Sinclair had published his novel The Jungle, shocking American readers with an account of the industry’s unsanitary practices and pro
mpting the passage of the Federal Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Like Upton Sinclair, Florence Kelley was an “impatient crusader”—settlement house worker, factory inspector, consumer advocate, cofounder of the NAACP, and later a leading pacifist. When Perkins encountered her in 1902, Kelley was the executive secretary of the National Consumers League, which she had founded. The idea of the league, its origins linked symbolically with the historic refusal of abolitionists to use sugar or wear garments made of cotton produced by slave labor, was that middle-class purchasers of goods could exercise reformist influence through their buying habits. In the early 1900s, the league targeted child labor and the tenement “factories” where workers suffered from diphtheria, typhoid, and tuberculosis (conditions not good for workers or the consumers who purchased the items they made). The group also provided labels of approval that industries practicing good hygiene were allowed to affix to their merchandise. Kelley had reacted angrily to Harris and Blanck’s escape from accountability for the Triangle Fire, wondering

  whether our statistics of the deaths of working people … would not move rapidly toward zero if we stopped extending Christian forgiveness to those who … lock their doors for fear lest a cheap shirtwaist be stolen, and themselves steal 146 young lives, if we went back to the old Jewish law, which gave an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. If we should apply that law … let us see just what lives would be called for if the working class really sent in their bill.100

  Out of the Opera House meeting devoted to Triangle had come a resolution to carry the demand for immediate action on factory safety to the seat of state government in Albany. A committee was elected, with Perkins as chief lobbyist, to urge the creation of a New York State factory inspection force.

  At the legislature in Albany, Perkins went to work converting two young dynamic New York City politicians—Assemblyman Al Smith and Senator Robert Wagner, known by the newspapers as “The Tammany Twins” for their affiliation with Tammany Hall, the city’s all-powerful Democratic political machine. Smith, who represented the Lower East Side, had been born on South Street, and as a child had watched the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge; by age fourteen he had left school to don an apron in the nearby Fulton Fish Market. Wagner had grown up in the heavily German Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville, the son of a janitor. Along with Smith, he had been tutored in politics by the sachem of Tammany, Charles F. Murphy, although unlike the charming but unlettered Al Smith, Wagner, with the help of his family, had managed to attend law school. Both men were known in Albany for their legislative acumen in doing Tammany’s bidding and for their ability to find civil service jobs for Tammany faithful. The families of those killed at Triangle, and the thousands of other New Yorkers who poured into the streets for their emotional public funeral, were largely Tammany constituents.

  Perkins, toughened by her experience among Philadelphia streetwalkers (she’d occasionally had to personally face down their pimps), understood the rough underside of urban politics and saw the Tammany machine for what it was—a corrupt enterprise, but one that nonetheless served and held sway with New York’s immigrant working class. She set out to help awaken its youngest lieutenants to the dire need for workplace safety legislation. “We used to make it our business,” recalled Perkins, “to take Al Smith … to see the women, thousands of them, coming off the ten-hour nightshift…. We made sure Robert Wagner personally crawled through the tiny hole in the wall that gave exit to a step ladder covered with ice and ending twelve feet from the ground, which was euphemistically labeled ‘Fire Escape.’ ”101 Smith in particular required little convincing. He had made the rounds of the Lower East Side in the days after the Triangle Fire, consoling victims’ relatives; he had even toured the morgue where the charred remnants of the deceased lay, an experience he never forgot.

  With the able leadership of her new allies and the wind of public outrage at their backs, Perkins and her colleagues pushed through the legislation creating the New York State Factory Investigating Commission (FIC), Governor John Alden Dix putting his signature to it on June 30, 1911, only three months after the Triangle Fire. Mary Dreier was to sit on the commission, the sole woman, while Rose Schneiderman, Frances Perkins, and Clara Lemlich were hired to serve as field investigators under the guidance of Dr. George Price, a well-regarded sanitation and public health authority. Abram Elkus, attorney to the commission, suggested that sanitation and industrial disease would also be examined. Endowed with the authority to subpoena witnesses, demand documents, and hire outside consultants, the FIC quickly became a Tammany vehicle over which Smith and Wagner exercised extensive control; it in turn enhanced their reputations as liberal, moral men willing to use the power of the state to right social wrongs.

  With Tammany providing the political juice as well as its star players, the FIC’s work garnered approving notices from the press. While the New York FIC was not the nation’s first state factory safety endeavor, it became the most prominent and sweeping in its efforts; its determined use of the state apparatus to regulate workplace conditions was seen as the “answer” to Triangle as well as the corrective to Lochner, in the very state where the bakeshop laws of the Lochner case had been discounted. There was no denying the commission was impressive in its accomplishments. In 1911 alone it investigated nearly two thousand factories, held public hearings in numerous cities including New York City, Syracuse, Buffalo, and Rochester, and grilled more than two hundred witnesses, creating almost thirty-five hundred pages of testimony. Fifteen new laws were suggested based on the commission’s work in just the first year, eight of which were enacted by the legislature.102

  Understandably, its signature issue was fire safety. FIC investigators found extensive manufacturing taking place in tenement buildings, brick structures with wooden interiors that offered little in the way of fire protection or evacuation measures. Even in more modern sites that housed factories, such as the Asch Building, the FIC discovered that owners tended to be made complacent by a false confidence that their premises, fitted with elevators and constructed of fireproof materials, required fewer precautions. Smith and Wagner pushed through the legislature a passel of fire regulations that mandated automatic sprinklers in tall buildings, the regular removal of flammable rubbish and other materials, doors that remained unlocked and opened outward, regulations governing employee smoking and the use of gas illumination, routine fire inspections and fire drills in firms with more than twenty-five employees, as well as new restrictions on manufacturing in tenement apartments.

  The FIC was also active in investigating the “dangerous trades”—industrial processes that used substances whose effects on workers could be deleterious, such as lead, arsenic, phosphorus, benzene, coal tar, turpentine, and mercury. The commission looked at 359 chemical facilities and found that protection for workers from dust and fumes was virtually nonexistent. Few factories had proper lighting or ventilation. Workers, uninformed about the risks to which they were exposed, toted chemicals in open containers up stairs and through narrow passages with little thought to safety. Non-English-speaking immigrants were often given the most at-risk tasks and had the least understanding of the dangers involved, while employers entertained convenient prejudices—that immigrants from Southern Europe succumbed to contamination because they bathed infrequently, or that Mexican fieldworkers were so childlike and careless it did no good to tell them about the dangers of insecticides.

  Here the FIC benefited from the pioneering work of Alice Hamilton, a community and industrial health expert who, like Kelley and Perkins, had apprenticed in Chicago’s settlement house movement. Hamilton, inspired by English reformer Thomas Oliver’s book about occupational diseases in Britain, Dangerous Trades, was among the first Americans to insist that workplace safety went beyond preventing mine cave-ins or hands mangled in power looms but must include a concern for the less obvious risks of industrial poisons, contamination, and disease. Afflictions relating to industrial chemicals were quiet killers
, for their effects were often years in developing. In 1908 Hamilton published the first article in America on industrial disease, inspiring Illinois governor Deneen to create a commission to study the problem of trades that used lead, brass, arsenic, and other suspect materials. Hamilton served the commission by investigating such problems in the Chicago area.

  “When I talked to my medical friends about the strange silence on this subject in [America],” Hamilton later recalled, “I gained the impression that here was a subject tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor. The American Medical Association had never had a meeting devoted to this subject.”103 She became recognized for her inquiries into the dangers of lead poisoning and of neurological problems afflicting workers in the hat-making industry due to exposure to high levels of mercury, which was the source of the expression “mad as a hatter.”

  Hamilton, who ultimately became the first woman on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School, tended to be nonconfrontational toward employers, at least in the early years of her career. She was willing to believe that it was ignorance rather than negligence that kept factory owners from correcting health and safety issues, and that businessmen were capable of being educated and would respond conscientiously if given convincing information—a faith she had largely abandoned by the early 1920s when she took on the DuPont Corporation and Standard Oil of New Jersey over the deadly effects on workers of the leaded additive used in ethyl gasoline.