Got this in my inbox yesterday, International Women’s Day,  from the VDP (reprinted with permission):

Standing Up Again – and Again

By Judy Bevans

Chairwoman

Vermont Democratic Party

With the national Republican legislative assault on collective bargaining rights we are witnessing in Wisconsin and other states, it’s a good time to remember our history. Not only is it Women’s History Month, and March 8th is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, but March 25th is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory employed women, lots of them, and many were immigrants. The factory occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch building on Washington Place in New York City. It was a Saturday, their sixth day of work, a seven-hour day instead of the nine they worked the rest of the week, plus overtime. As they got ready to leave, preparing to open their pocketbooks for inspection at the only unlocked door, someone yelled, “FIRE!”

The 146 workers who died – 129 of them women – were burned trying to get out the other door, leapt from the ninth floor to their deaths rather than be burned, or died when the fire escape buckled and fell from the building. Some leapt down the elevator shaft only to be crushed on the top of the car. Seventeen of the dead workers were men. Six of the victims – one man and five women – were identified only last month.

The foreman escaped, with the keys. The building’s owners later insisted the building was “fireproofed” and had been certified by city inspectors. There were just 27 water buckets for firefighting, along with huge bolts of flammable material and piles of fabric scraps on the factory floor.

The owners were acquitted at trial and settled two years later with 23 families who sued them paying each just $75. The owners were compensated $400 per life lost by their insurance company.

The fire and its legacy boosted the organizing efforts of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the ILGWU. Workers realized that only by speaking together in one voice would the changes they demanded to protect their lives and bring dignity to their work be made.

History like this underscores why we must stand with workers – whatever the color of their collars. As Rose Schneiderman, a union activist with the Women’s Trade Union League said just days after the fire, “[E]very time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us. … I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.”

We must stand with workers and we must stand with women. Women have always been in the workplace. And women have always sought control over their reproductive rights, by any means available. The death toll among women, who had no choice but to succumb to noxious chemicals swallowed or squirted, or secret surgeries in less than sterile surroundings, was as murderous as the arrogance of factory owners.

[more on the flip …]

Before Roe v. Wade, women who had more children than they could care for, who had been raped, who could not safely carry a fetus to term, who had to work to live – these women and many more died for the lack of adequate medical care and a safe alternative to back-alley abortions and do-it-yourself miscarriages.

According to Cornell University’s online history of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, things haven’t changed enough: “Recent studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor found that 67% of Los Angeles garment factories and 63% of New York garment factories violate minimum wage and overtime laws. Ninety-eight percent of Los Angeles garment factories have workplace health and safety problems serious enough to lead to severe injuries or death.”

According to the Republicans in Congress seeking to defund Planned Parenthood, it is more important to take away women’s rights to private, safe reproductive medical care than to pass policies designed to create jobs for our millions of unemployed. They want to take us back 101 years, to a time when workers and women had not yet found ways to make their voices heard.

We won’t go back. We won’t stand for retrograde laws. Every time conservatives and tea partiers try to knock us into the early days of the last century, we will stand up for our rights as workers and as women. We will not go back. We will stand up. Again and again.

Tell it, sister!