Triangle Fire Centennial, Regulation and Labor Under Attack

Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City in which 146 garment workers died. Let's take the opportunity to remind ourselves why organized labor should have the ability to negotiate working conditions and why the government should have the power to regulate. As Robert Reich said in his biweekly commentary for Marketplace yesterday,

Those who argue that regulations kill jobs ignore an important fact: Lack of adequate regulation kills people.

He was starting from the failure of GE's reactors in Fukushima. Sadly, the logic that applied to a horrible tragedy one hundred years ago still bears repeating today.

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