Some died trapped behind locked doors, others crashed from windows to the pavement below in a desperate bid to escape the flames. The only fire escape was an internal stair, which buckled under the strain, and was useless. Some of the victims were only 15 year-old girls.

Hundreds of thousands took part in a funeral procession in pouring rain which became part of a massive movement of anger. In the previous year workers had gone on strike, and one of their demands was for adequate fire precautions. But they were defeated, and the militants victimised.

Among these was Rose Schneiderman, whose speech to a commemoration gathering in the Metropolitan Opera House is quoted below. Members of the UNITE garment and textile workers union are holding a rally at the site of the Triangle Fire to remember the tragedy and continue the fight against global sweatshop exploitation.

From Bangkok to South Africa, China to Bangladesh, every year come fresh horrific reminders that the struggle to stop capitalism murdering workers still goes on.

Triangle Fire: We Have Found You Wanting

by Rose Schneiderman

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 46 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

Public officials have only words of warning to us--warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of he law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

Leon Stein, ed., Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy (New York: Quadrangle/New Times Book Company, 1977), pp. 196-197.

To find out more about the Triangle Fire visit: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/ the website of the Kheel collection at Cornell University. It includes articles, pictures, and recorded survivors' accounts., as well as tips for high school history projects and a bibliography. The US textile union site is http://www.uniteunion,org/.