Triangulation 0
Harold Meyerson commemorates the Triangle Shirtwaist fire: the factory owner’s resistance to workers’ demands for safer working conditions, the staircases locked to keep workers in, the fire escape that collapsed for lack of maintenance, the workers jumping to their deaths to escape the flames . . .
. . . and the reaction of business owners, who considered workers disposable, to the minimal safety regulations that followed (emphasis added):
Such complaints, of course, are with us still. We hear them from mine operators after fatal explosions, from bankers after they’ve crashed the economy, from energy moguls after their rig explodes or their plant starts leaking radiation. We hear them from politicians who take their money. We hear them from Republican members of Congress and from some Democrats, too. A century after Triangle, greed encased in libertarianism remains a fixture of — and danger to — American life.
