NEWS FEATURE: Memories of 1911 fire provide moral meaning for today

c. 1997 Religion News Service LOS ANGELES _ Rose Friedman, 104, marvels at her memory. A survivor of the March 25, 1911, Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire in New York City, she can still recall the panic when smoke engulfed the ninth floor. “People were running from one place to another screaming and crying,” she said. […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

LOS ANGELES _ Rose Friedman, 104, marvels at her memory. A survivor of the March 25, 1911, Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire in New York City, she can still recall the panic when smoke engulfed the ninth floor.

“People were running from one place to another screaming and crying,” she said. “The doors were locked all the time because the owners thought that somebody could steal and get away. The only thing left was a fire escape. It was overloaded and it broke.”


Teen-age girls jumped in twos and threes from windows while onlookers watched helplessly from below. Friedman ran up an internal staircase to the 10th floor executive offices.

“I wanted to see what the executives were doing,” she said. “But they all saved themselves. There was nobody there.” She ran up to the roof, where she met firemen who hoisted her to the roof of an adjacent building. Below her, 146 people, mostly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, lay dead.

“Still inside I feel so bad,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “It could have been different if only one person from the 10th floor had said, `I’ll open the door for you.”’

The fire eventually led to improved workplace health and safety regulations and a stronger International Ladies Garment Workers Union. But eight decades later, Friedman said she still hears reports of unsafe conditions and unfair wages, this time from Latino workers in sweatshops that produce garments for apparel manufacturers. She is distraught to find that some of those manufacturers are Jews, who, she believes, have failed to learn from the Triangle fire.

“The Jewish people I’m so proud of are mistreating the (Latinos),” she said. “That’s the result of all those victims?”

Now a recently formed coalition of Jewish groups is asking similar questions. The Los Angeles Jewish Commission on Sweatshops, which includes representatives of the American Jewish Congress, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and the National Council of Jewish Women, has been formed to investigate conditions in the apparel industry. It is beginning with Jewish-owned manufacturers, who represent an estimated 20 percent of the apparel manufacturing industry in Los Angeles, according to University of California Santa Barbara sociology professor Richard P. Appelbaum.

Appelbaum, a commission member who is co-authoring a book about the Los Angeles garment industry, estimates Jewish-owned firms account for 56 percent of the combined sales of the approximately 200 largest manufacturers whose annual sales exceed $10 million.


The commission, members say, is not accusing companies of wrongdoing before investigating nor suggesting that labor violations in Jewish-owned companies are more egregious than those in non-Jewish-owned firms. But given the emphasis in Jewish teaching about the welfare of the worker and the history of Jews in the garment industry as workers, union organizers and owners, they believe Jews have a historic and moral mandate to ensure employees are treated fairly. And they’re holding their own accountable.

“There’s an ancient Talmudic principle that all Jews are responsible for one another,” said commission co-chairman Leonard Beerman, rabbi emeritus of Leo Baeck Temple in West Los Angeles, “and that means accountability as well.”

This fall the commission will hold a series of hearings with government officials, garment manufacturers, union representatives and workers to learn more about conditions in the factories.

The airing of family laundry is being lauded and lambasted within the industry. Stan Levy, an outside legal counsel for Guess? Inc. who also has rabbinic training, said he welcomes the scrutiny.

“I think they should focus on Jewish manufacturers,” said Levy, who has on his office wall a Mezuzah _ a small box containing a Torah passage declaring God’s unity _ covered with scraps of fabric from Guess? clothing. “A very, very significant number of the manufactures in Los Angeles are Jewish (and) I believe that we have a particular obligation about how our own are treating people.”

Critics fear such a focus will fuel anti-Semitism, and they question whether any group has the moral authority or responsibility to police its own.


“I highly object to scrutiny based on religious belief,” said Leonard Rabinowitz, co-chairman of Carole Little, a company the commission approached for information about its contractors. “Anything wrong and inappropriate is not humane. It doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish-owned, Wasp-owned or Hispanic-owned. … It makes me crazy to even think about.” His co-owner, Carole Little, he said, is not Jewish.

Monitoring the practices of any apparel company is tough. Los Angeles is the largest apparel center in the United States, with an estimated 150,000 workers. But few companies assemble their own garments, said Goetz Wolff, University of California at Los Angeles professor in urban planning. Instead, they rely on an estimated 4,000 contractors, usually immigrant-owned businesses.

Company owners, said Wolff, often offer contractors so little money the contractors must pay sub-minimum wages and deny workers overtime pay. Historically, apparel manufacturers have denied responsibility for the conditions in contractors’ shops.

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Los Angeles’ largest apparel manufacturer, Guess? Inc., was the first company to form a pact in 1992 with the Labor Department to monitor its contractors’ compliance with labor laws.

The move followed repeated Labor Department citings of Guess? for violations under the “hot goods” provision of the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act. That provision bars interstate transport of goods made at companies that violate federal minimum wage, overtime pay or child labor laws.

Guess? was also the first company to request a meeting with the sweatshop commission. “We talked a little bit about our side of the story,” Levy said. The owners of Guess? are the sons of a rabbi, he notes, and “very decent people (who) care about employees and how employees are being treated.” Five years ago, he said, the company “recognized that our level of monitoring had to be intensified,” an effort he said has proved increasingly effective.


Last November, however, continuing violations prompted the Labor Department to remove Guess? from its “Trendsetter” list of apparel manufacturers and retailers it says are making efforts to avoid doing business with sweatshops. The company, labor officials say, remains “on probation.”

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Even with its troubled history, Levy believes that “for more than 100 years, the apparel industry has been a fabulous industry for immigrants. They went to work in factories at (lousy) jobs for (lousy) wages, but within a few years for many of them they were able to open up their own little sewing factories or become manufacturers or cutters or distributors. And that’s exactly the same situation today.”

To insist that apparel workers be paid higher wages and benefits, he said, would push manufacturers to produce goods outside of the United States. “Any manufacturer that continues to work in this country has already made a moral decision that it’s willing to pay a price to do that.”

Rabbi Beerman believes companies are to be commended for providing jobs, “but that doesn’t mean that they’re absolved of providing (employees) with dignified conditions in which to work and a measure of compensation that will make it possible for them to live in a decent way. They undergird the whole notion of a religious perspective of what it means to be a child of God.”

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The commission has not yet finalized a plan of action to follow the hearings. Possibilities include having rabbis and other religious leaders accompany federal and state labor officials when they make unannounced sweatshop sweeps and the publication of ethical shopping guidelines.

David Waskow, regional program director of the American Jewish Congress, Pacific Southwest Division, said it remains to be seen whether the group will work with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), which formed in 1995 when the International Ladies Garment Workers Union merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.


So far, UNITE says it has more than 3,000 members in Los Angeles; some industry observers believe the number is far lower. Some observers attribute the low membership to the past failure of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union to put muscle behind community-based organizing efforts and to the difficulty of organizing in so many small shops.

Mexican-born seamstress Enriqueta Soto said employees, many of whom are undocumented, are afraid to back UNITE.

Last Spring, Soto heard Rose Friedman reminisce about labor conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. Friedman spoke at a Dignity Seder for Latino garment workers and descendants of Jewish garment workers, sponsored by the American Jewish Congress.

“It was hugely emotional for me,” said Soto, who is supporting a UNITE boycott of Guess? clothing. “She’s lived the same experience I’ve lived. We don’t have any type of benefits either, and we don’t have good conditions in the shops. In 17 years in the garment industry, I never got a raise of even a penny.”

Friedman, a staunch union supporter who has been studying Spanish since she was 100, was startled by such testimony 86 years after the Triangle fire.

“They’re using the working people and taking advantage of the needy ones,” she said. “It’s a shame. It’s the biggest shame. I’m with the Spanish people.”


MJP END LIEBLICH

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