On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Within eighteen minutes, one hundred and forty-six workers were dead, most of them young immigrant women. The tragedy was not caused by the fire itself but by the locked doors, blocked stairways, and nonexistent safety measures that turned a manageable blaze into a death trap. The Triangle fire became the single most important catalyst for workplace safety reform in American history. The workers at the Triangle factory were overwhelmingly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, some as young as fourteen, who labored ten or more hours a day in cramped conditions for poverty wages. The factory owners had deliberately locked the exit doors to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks or stealing scraps of fabric, a common practice in th ...