Eric Reyes-Barriga

enters a looser regulatory environment, what does our past tell us about the future of workplace safety?

It's Sunday, December 21st.

I'm Katherine Sullivan for The Wall Street Journal.

This is USA 250, a podcast series connecting America's economic present to its past.

We'll be occasionally dropping into your What's News feed over the next few months with stories that interrogate, celebrate, and make sense of our economic history.

This is Episode 2, The Struggle to Keep America's Workers Safe.

To understand the state of the American workplace today, we have to understand how things used to be.

In March 1911, a young woman named Frances Perkins was walking near Washington Square Park in Manhattan.

She recalled the event during a lecture she gave over 50 years later.

They could see a large 10-story building with the top three floors on fire.

It was a garment factory called Triangle Shirtwaist that made women's cotton blouses.

Employees there worked long shifts, 10 to 13 hours a day, six to seven days a week.

It was essentially a sweatshop.

With doors to the main staircases of the factory locked and smoke billowing out of the building, young garment workers crowded at the 8th, 9th and 10th floor windows while firemen below struggled to get nets out to catch them.

At least 146 people, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrant women and girls, died in the Triangle Fire.

The owners of the factory had locked the doors to all but one exit to prevent employees from stealing a stray blouse while on the job.

The accident captured the public's attention at a time when Americans were beginning to see the toll that industrialized workplaces were having on employees.

Gerald Markowitz is a historian of public health, a professor at John Jay College in New York, and an author of over a dozen books on occupational and public health.

Until this time, responsibility for worker safety was generally laid on the individual workers themselves, not on their employers.

In response to the Triangle Fire, an industry group called the National Association of Manufacturers attempted to double down on this idea by producing a silent film called The Crime of Carelessness.