Social and Environmental Protection

From our vantage point as a generation experiencing climate change that started with those first factories, we can look back at the dawn of industrialization with the benefit of hindsight. We can see the damming of waterways, the use of those waterways for industrial runoff, the extraction of resources like wood and coal, and the smoke and soot they spewed into the air as catastrophic scars on our current landscape. Though most of the mills are gone or renovated, those scars often remain.

It is not just the natural environment that suffers. True sustainability encompasses both an environmental and a social component. Workers and those living in surrounding areas have felt the impact of the industrial revolution most deeply. The garment industry in the U.S. will forever be connected to the 146 people who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City in 1911, mainly women and young girls. That was not the first tragedy to strike the industry. Others, such as the Pemberton Mill Collapse fifty years before, or the Granite Mills Fire of 1874, also captured the public’s attention via the illustrated newspapers and popular songs of the time.

Additionally, the use of child labor was common in the industry, both in the factories and in the fields, with little protection, throughout the 19th century. Photographer Lewis Hine is well known for the images of child labor that he published as a means of pushing reform. And it worked; continued pressure by progressive reformers and labor organizers throughout the 19th and 20th centuries created the workplace laws and protections we have today. Similar pressure on behalf of the environment spurred the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency and laws to protect our air and water.

Still, industrial pollution and workplace accidents have not been swept into the dustbin of history. Despite gains, children working in the fields often remain unprotected. A 2018 report found that more children in the U.S. die working in agriculture than in any other industry. On the other side of the world, the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013 killed an estimated 1,132 people, nearly 8 times the number of deaths in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. And in 2022, images of fast fashion washed up on a beach in Ghana made international headlines. We have merely exported the negative side effects, so while the global north does most of the consumption, its people no longer see first-hand the impact of textile and garment manufacturing experienced in other countries around the world.

My Memories as a Worker in the Notorious Triangle Waist Company Factory in New York City, Beginning in 1906 (1st page)

Bernard Baum. My Memories as a Worker in the Notorious Triangle Waist Company Factory in New York City, Beginning in 1906 (1st page), ca. 1946.

On loan from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives

Collection/Call #: 6036/033

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“The Fall River Disaster,” Harper's Weekly

Harper's Magazine Company. “The Fall River Disaster,” Harper's Weekly, 1874.

Collection/Call #: 6524/004 G

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Harper's Magazine Company. “Ruins of the Pemberton Mill at Lawrence, Mass.,” Harper's Weekly, January 21, 1860.

On loan from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives

Collection/Call #: 6689 G

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Ebenezer Mann. “The Lawrence Tragedy or Fallen Mill,” 1860.

On loan from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives

Collection/Call #: 6524/004 G

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A.W. Harmon. “The Granite Mill Fire at Fall River, Mass.,” 1874.

On loan from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives

Collection/Call #: 6524/004 G

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Lewis Hine. “Children or Cotton. A Photo Story of Cotton Picking in Texas by Lewis Hine,” The Survey, Vol. 31, no. 19, January 7, 1914.

Compare this to the stereo image of Black children in the cotton fields in the Landscape section from roughly the same period. Whose children are seen as worth protecting?

On loan from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives

Collection/Call #: 6524/011 PUBS

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Council of the Southern Mountains. “Cotton Dust Kills,” Mountain Life and Work: The Magazine of the Appalachian South, 1977.

The issue of cotton dust has been around since the start of the industrialization of cotton textiles. The damage it causes, referred to as Brown Lung Disease, is a continuing global health problem.

On loan from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives

Collection/Call #: 5619/015

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T. H. Stafford. Stream Pollution and Abatement in New England from the Point of View of Industry, 1950.

On loan from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives

Collection/Call #: 6524/011 PUBS

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F. Gleason. “Watham Bleachery,” Gleason's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, 1853.

This tranquil rural scene belies the issue that the bleach from this mill was likely being discharged directly into the stream where we see people fishing (and probably drinking the water as well).

On loan from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives

Collection/Call #: 6689 G

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UNITE. Spanish version of UNITE Fight, The NAFTA Scam, 1997.

Translated, the top reads: “The contamination created by the factories poisons the communities and neighborhoods in which the workers live.”

On loan from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives

Collection/Call #: 6000/027 PUBS

Rosaline Costa. Hotline Bangladesh, October 2000.

On loan from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives

Collection/Call #: 6000/027 PUBS

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“A man looks out over the site of the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse,” in Whoever Raises their Head Suffers the Most: Workers' Rights in Bangladesh's Garment Factories

Human Rights Watch, G.M.B. Akash/Panos. “A man looks out over the site of the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse,” in Whoever Raises their Head Suffers the Most: Workers' Rights in Bangladesh's Garment Factories, 2015.

It can be difficult to fathom that over 1,000 more people died in the Rana Plaza collapse than in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. In 1911, unionization of those industries before the fire gave workers in the U.S. a forum from which to demand change. Over one hundred years later, workers seeking to organize in other countries face a similar uphill battle.

Collection/Call #: Oversize TT496.B3 W46 2015 +

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