...That's the question I come away with after watching this documentary on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. The workers at Triangle and at other similar factories and sweatshops in New York City at the time were female, poor, largely from immigrant families. And nobody with the power to do anything about their plight really cared what happened to them. Until the day the 8th floor factory went ablaze, the firemen could not reach a story in a building of that height, the windows burst from the heat, and the bodies began to be thrown from those now open windows, still ablaze as they fell to the ground. 149 dead in all, mainly women.
This episode does not spend lots of time on the fire itself - maybe 15 minutes on the blaze and its aftermath. It does spend lots of time talking about the strike in 1909 that lasted into 1910 in which the Triangle employees held out for a union but in the end had to settle for better wages and circumstances. Nobody really cared about the workers then. The police and Triangle's owners' hired thugs beat the women regularly and nobody did anything. Some wealthy women marched with them until the cry began to be for a more equitable workplace rather than a tolerable one. Gosh, that sounded like socialism! It was one thing to be charitable to the workers, quite another for them to have rights. And basically, the wealthy did not like the idea of workers getting legal protections. They liked their Gilded Age just the way it was.
Over the next two years after the fire New York did put in place some basic protections for workers. However, the two owners of the Triangle who had really caused the disaster by locking a back door so no employee could escape a baggage inspection when they left, were acquitted of manslaughter charges, took their insurance - their "dead peasants" payout - and slinked into obscurity but probably not poverty.
There is lots of narration that appears to be of survivors of the fire, but one narration seems to be from the last person who died from the fire - she actually died in the hospital - but who initially survived by jumping from the window. I knock off one star because it is never said whether these narrations are of actual quotes or just a dramatization of events.