Factory Deaths and Individual Liberty

The proper function and size of government is a seemingly infinite debate that, at least among politicians who favor rhetoric over reason, has made little headway. But it’s difficult to conceive how basic workplace safety regulations, assuming they are rigorously enforced and substantiated by solid evidence, could be anything but beneficial to the average worker, who is too often a victim of authoritarian employers solely concerned with financial profit. The recent collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh resulted in over 800 deaths that could have been easily prevented. Indeed, we here in the United States and specifically in the great state of New York have a historical model that demonstrates how government regulations can improve working conditions practically overnight.   

On March 25, 1911, 146 workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in a building located one block from Washington Square Park in Manhattan. Historian Robert A. Slayton describes the horror of the event in Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith:

James McCadeen, a worker in a nearby building, “saw a girl come to the edge of the roof and stand for a minute. Her hair was in flames. I couldn’t look anymore.” That anonymous victim was joined by many more, who made the impossible choice between being burned alive or jumping to their deaths. Some of them, facing an alleyway, plunged onto a spiked wrought-iron fence and were imapled.

[…]

A New York Times reporter came upon a headless and charred trunk on the sidewalk and inquired of a nearby policeman if it was a man or a woman. The grizzled veteran, who claimed he had worked other New York calamities but they were nothing like this, responded, “It’s human, that’s all you can tell.”

Although it’s true that “accidents happen,” in this instance, the conditions of the factory virtually guaranteed that many workers could not escape in the event of a fire. The back entrance to the building was locked to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks. The door to the staircase opened the wrong way, thus making it difficult for a rushing horde of people to squeeze into the stairwell. The fire escape collapsed as soon as few people tried to step on it. No fire drills had ever been conducted because the factory owners didn’t want to waste time with safety precautions when they could be making money. There was a fire hose, but it barely worked. It took only 30 minutes for 146 workers, most of them women who earned meager pay, to die.

In June of 1911, the Factory Investigation Commission (FIC) was created and Robert Wagner (who would later serve as a U.S. Senator from 1927 to 1949) was named its Chairman and Al Smith (who later ran for President against Herbert Hoover in 1928) its Vice Chairman. The FIC traveled throughout the state, conducted hundreds of interviews, and compiled thousands of pages of testimony. The sweeping investigations discovered, among many other abuses, the horrendous conditions of the canning industry, in which young children, some of them only three years old, worked from 4am to as late as 10pm every day.

In response to their investigations, the FIC created 32 bills, many of which became law. The regulations are now commonplace across the United States. As Slayton explains,

Today doors must egress to the outside, and there is always a panic bar that can be slammed with a foot or shoulder. The commission required that all doors and windows leading to fire escapes be marked with crimson paint, although their original concept called for “a clearly painted sign marked ‘exit’…and in addition, a red light shall be placed over all such exits.” Today’s version is the bright red exit sign we see everywhere…

Fire drills…were also mandated for the first time [and]…sprinklers became mandatory in factories.

All of these new requirements were met with opposition from factory owners who claimed they could not afford the additional costs. Yet somehow, magically, hundreds of thousands of profitable factories still exist in the U.S. today.

Any conversation about individual liberty must acknowledge the tendency, both in the United States and throughout the world, both historically and in the present day, for some business owners to have little regard for their workers, sometimes even to the extent of killing them via negligence. If no powerful entity exists to combat this corporate authoritarianism, then all notions of liberty become mere fantasies totally divorced from everyday reality. The tragedy in Bangladesh is an important reminder of how far we’ve come and of how we went about bettering the lives of millions of workers across the country.

It’s Time to End the War on Terror

“We are at war” seems to be an excuse these days for nearly any instance of government misbehavior or illegality. It is generally acknowledged and accepted that during wartime, acts that would be unthinkable during a time of peace are easily excused. It is horrifying to reflect upon the bombing of Dresden, which claimed more than 20,000 lives, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which wiped over 150,000 souls off the face of the earth. In retrospect, we might question the wisdom of these attacks (Dwight Eisenhower, for instance, maintained that dropping the bomb on Japan “was completely unnecessary”), but most Americans generally believe these events, however horrifying the cost might have been, were essential to protect and restore democracy. The same holds true for the war on terror, in which a wide variety of government abuses are frequently justified with the old edict that “we are at war.” Perhaps the best way to combat this line of thinking is to declare, officially and unequivocally, that the war on terror is over. If the idea of ending the war on terror is advanced throughout the halls of Congress and the public at large, many of the issues we contend with today, such as the closure of Guantanamo Bay, the legal and moral complications of drone strikes, and the normalization of sweeping executive power, could lose popular support.

Although I almost entirely disagreed with this Atlantic piece on what drone policy dissenters supposedly “get wrong,” there was one salient point made:

As someone who has spent over two years in combat, I suggest that the main point of moral judgment comes before one asks which means are legitimate when attacking an enemy. The main turning point concerns the question of whether we should fight at all. This is the crucial decision, because once we engage in armed conflict, we must assume that there are going to be many casualties on all sides. When we deliberate whether or not to fight, we should assume that once we step on this escalator, it will carry us to places we would rather not go.

It is often said by advocates of the war on terror that the struggle to eliminate terrorism is a unique war without borders or, oftentimes, clearly identifiable enemies. But labeling the fight against Islamic terrorism a “war” is merely a rhetorical justification for the seemingly unrestricted powers claimed by the Bush and Obama administrations to, among other things, assassinate suspects without judicial oversight or even public disclosure of the suspect’s alleged crimes, imprison innocent people in torturous facilities indefinitely, and refuse to investigate high-ranking officials who literally adopted and implemented enemy torture tactics. Lawlessness now pervades much of our government and many citizens accept this as a necessary extreme to ward off terrorist attacks, which are about as likely to claim the life of a U.S. citizen as a bolt of lightening.

We’ve overreacted to the threat of Islamic terrorism to such an extreme and alarming degree that many of us now strain to remember the years in which one did not face the real possibility of being groped by security agents at airports or corresponding with friends without the knowledge that the conversations, like billions of others annually stored in government databases, might be monitored. And what of the terrified Muslim communities infiltrated by government spies? Or the innocent Muslim Americans subjected to physical and verbal abuse by any hotheaded fool who happens to pass them on the street? Or the Congressional hearings that regard nearly all Muslims as potential enemies? In our self-absorbed, self-righteous anger, we often forget that the primary victims of Islamic terrorist attacks are innocent Muslims. We’ve learned, as Robert F. Kennedy once said, “to hate and fear” Muslim Americans, often regarding them “not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest.” It is not difficult to see that by degrading Muslims around the world, we have also degraded ourselves and our nation.

The sooner we roll back this war, the sooner we can restore our nation to normal, and the sooner we can go on living our lives without allowing a pack of murderers to forever disrupt them. In attempting to defend our “values” and our “way of life” from terrorism, we have too often destroyed those things ourselves.