On July 7, 1910, another large strike hit the garment factories of Manhattan. About 60,000 cloakmakers left their jobs, backed by the ILGWU (International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union). The factories formed their own protective association. Both strikers and factory owners were largely Jewish.
At the initiation of A. Lincoln Filene, owner of the Boston-based department store, a reformer and social worker, Meyer Bloomfield, convinced both the union and the protective association to allow Louis Brandeis, then a prominent Boston-area lawyer, to oversee negotiations, and to try to get both sides to withdraw from attempts to use courts to settle the strike.
The settlement led to a Joint Board of Sanitary Control being established, where labor and management agreed to cooperate in establishing standards above the legal minimums for factory working conditions, and also agreed to cooperatively monitor and enforce the standards.
This strike settlement, unlike the 1909 settlement, resulted in union recognition for the ILGWU by some of the garment factories, allowed for the union to recruit workers to the factories (a "union standard," not quite a "union shop"), and provided for disputes to be handled through arbitration rather than strikes.
Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called it "more than a strike" -- it was "an industrial revolution" because it brought the union into partnership with the textile industry in determining workers' rights.
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: Index of Articles
- Quick Overview of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
- Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire -- the fire itself
- Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Picture Gallery
- Background: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
- The 1909 "Uprising of the Twenty Thousand"
- 1910 Cloakmakers' Strike - the Great Revolt
- 1911 - Conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
- After the Fire: Identifying the Victims, Newspaper Coverage, Relief Efforts
- After the Fire: Memorial at the Metropolitan Opera House, Public Funeral March
- After the Fire: Investigations, Trial
- Frances Perkins and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
- Triangle Factory Fire Trivia
- Bibliography, Media
