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.

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

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