Work Place Violence

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, was one of the deadliest fires to happen in U.S history. This fire caused the death of 146 workers, not to mention the 71 workers that received non-fatal injuries. Many of the deaths occurred when people started to jump out of the windows to escape the fate of burning alive. The workers started jumping because some of the doors were locked by the company owners to prevent workers from taking breaks.

 

David Huyssen uses this event to lead into his chapter where he talks, in depth, about workplace violence that was going on at the beginning of the 20th century. Huyssen explains how the lower class workers would go on strike or or protest against unfair or unsafe work conditions. The “advantage of wealthy belligerents was the ability to employ proxies in any violent confrontation, thereby obscuring their own role in visiting aggression upon the poor” (153). The wealthy company owners were able to provoke animosity towards the working class by hiring “strikebreakers, private security forces, police, the military, and even prostitutes” (153). Company management was able to escape punishment for their hostile actions because the company owners used strict structures of power to control worker labor. Employers maintained this control of power through “managerial control, the judiciary, or broadly accepted extralegal tactics such as the hiring of mercenaries” (153).

 

As Huyssen points out that physically fighting with workers was not the only way that workers were physically abused. The use of braking technology that allowed trains to be coupled together automatically was   late to be employed because from a business perspective it was cheaper for company to continue paying for new workers. These railroad companies would have to buy new workers because to couple the cars together by hand, workers would run the risk of getting a finger, an arm, or the top half of their body chopped off, and it was much cheaper to keep buying workers than it was to buy the braking system. This is a delayed form of abuse that is just as bad (if not worse) as hiring proxies to beat up on the workers.  

 

To know that there is a technology out there that would save your lowest ranking employees from being physically harmed or killed, and still refusing to implement it because it is just cheaper to replace your workers. This act is outright evil because not only would workers be unable to work, but “unemployed men and women faced a regular threat of coercive violence on the street” (156). Being public unemployed was illegal in New York so unemployed men and women were “rounded up by the hundreds and… arraigned for vagrancy” (156).

 

With the stories that David Huyssen points out, is there any sort of similar workplace violence that happens today? Or, generally speaking, are the work environments in America better than they were in the beginning of the 20th century? In the early 20th century when American workers were being abused to make products for America, is that any different from how American companies employ the use of sweatshops and child labor today?