Almost 100 years later - and how much safer is working in NYC?

Imagine this: 146 young immigrant workers killed in a blazing 10-storey factory in Manhattan - mostly seamstresses who burned or jumped to their deaths to avoid the flames (shown in this photo from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law).

It happened - 97 years ago this week - in the tragedy known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Most of the fire's victims were teenage girls - these were days of sweatshops and child labor. Many of them did not speak English.

New to blogging myself, I am discovering the power of blogs - their immediacy and instant accessibility to multiple news sources. A fabulous case in point is the post from The Daily Gotham  - a blog that focuses on NYC life - that drew my attention again to this famous 1911 tragedy.

Things have changed... sort of

North American law doesn't allow child labor or the kinds of deplorable working conditions, hours and pay that prevailed a century ago, thankfully.

However, on-the-job accidents and deaths continue at a scary, and unacceptable, pace. And workplace accidents and fatalities remain particularly high for immigrant workers - just like those young women and children who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Immigrant workers who:

• may not have the required paperwork and therefore the ability to formally lodge complaints
• may not know the culture and what their rights are in the workplace or otherwise
• may struggle with partial or full illiteracy and language barriers
• may not have other economic options and therefore stay silent

These most vulnerable workers most need our society's protection from - as another excellent blog, Working Immigrants puts it -  "the toxic cocktail of employers wanting to hire undocumented workers and then cheating on safety and/or workers compensation rules."

What I want to know is: how come we can enforce change to protect against exploitation at work, but we cannot seem to stop businesses from taking chances with the lives and limbs of their employees? For example, a flurry of recent workplace deaths in NYC has been driven largely by the "red-hot NYC construction industry where time is money," The Daily Gotham blog states.

In summary, that blog states the situation in very plain English: "These deaths are widely and falsely described as “accidents." There is nothing accidental about them. They are predictable and preventable. They should be prevented."

Hear, hear...! From one blogger to another, WELL PUT!