I wonder what my Great Aunt Fannie, who died in the historic Triangle Fire, would think about today’s challenging spot for U.S. workers
On March 25, 114 years ago, a New York City factory fire killed 146 workers. The dead included my Great Aunt Fannie Lansner.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire killed my paternal grandfather’s sister, a 21-year-old immigrant from Lithuania. A forewoman at the clothing factory, she died after helping coworkers escape, leaping out an eighth-floor window to escape flames and smoke overwhelming those unable to flee.
The legacy of Great Aunt Fannie and her 145 fellow victims is that their fiery deaths launched revolutions for American workplace safety, building codes and unions.
A century-plus later, I wonder what Great Aunt Fannie would think about today’s challenging job landscape, especially the nation’s labor movement.
Contemplate some high-profile union activity in recent years. For example, government jobs stats show 22 million workdays were lost to strikes in 2022-24. That sum equals the tally of the previous 17 years. Yet the recent sign of unity shown by these work stoppages couldn’t slow a long-running shrinkage of union membership.
My trusty spreadsheet, filled with numbers from UnionStats.com that track federal labor movement data, found 14.2 million union members in 2024, the second-lowest count in figures dating to 1973.
California is No. 1 for union members with 2.4 million, but that’s an 18-year low. Next comes New York at 1.7 million and Illinois at 734,800.
