Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

23 results back to index


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Brooks, “How the First Woman in the U.S. Cabinet Found Her Vocation.” 34. Hadassa Kosak, “Triangle Shirtwaist Fire,” Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed November 10, 2019, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/triangle-shirtwaist-fire. 35. Tony Michels, “Uprising of 20,000 (1909),” Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed November 10, 2019, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/uprising-of-20000-1909. 36. Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen, “The Fire Last Time,” New Republic, March 11, 2011, https://newrepublic.com/article/85134/wisconsin-unions-walker-triangle-shirtwaist-fire. 37. Thomas R. Layton and Einer R. Elhauge, “U.S., Fire Catastrophes of the 20th Century,” Journal of Burn Care & Research 3, no. 1 (January–February 1982): 24, https://doi.org/10.1097/00004630-198201000-00003. 38.

At the end of the strike, 85 percent of the city’s shirtwaist workers had joined the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU),35 but the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory remained anti-union.36 At the time, New York, like most states, had new factory safety laws on the books, but they were rarely enforced, with “standards for fire drills, fire escapes, and sprinkler systems [in New York] . . . followed ‘only where practicable.’”37 The Fire Department of the City of New York had cited the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory multiple times for failing to provide sufficient fire escapes, yet had taken no meaningful action against the owners.38 Following the tragic fire, a citizens’ Committee on Safety was established to spur workplace safety legislation.

Her activism on worker safety took a turn when she was having tea with friends in New York’s Washington Square one spring afternoon in 1911, a full two decades before the start of the New Deal.30 At the time, Perkins, then just thirty years old, was deeply engrossed in the fight for workers’ rights through her role leading the New York office of the National Consumers League. On that day, Perkins heard commotion and cries for help coming from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and ran to the scene, where she witnessed the “horrifying spectacle”31 of more than fifty young female workers forced to jump to their deaths from the burning building.32 The women, Perkins recalled watching, “had been holding on until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer.”33 The ninth-floor exits had been closed by management seeking to prevent theft, keep out union organizers, and prevent walkouts.


pages: 284 words: 85,643

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

See also class conflict; race relations Ignatiev, Noel Immigration Act (1921) income disparity “American Dream” and flattening of wages and “job creators” middle class and Reagan and whites and See also class conflict indentured servitude Institute for Research on Poverty intermarriage International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union In These Times In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York, 1626 to 1963 (Hughes) Iowa, 2008 primaries in Iran Contra Iraq War Irish Catholic Americans abolition and African American–Irish conflict and alcoholism and assimilation of “black Irish” class conflict and college education of contraception and Draft Riots Hard Hat Riot (1970) hierarchy among Irish immigrants indentured servitude of multiculturalism and 1930s New York City 1960s activism and as police September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Smith and Wright on See also race relations Isserman, Maurice Italian Americans, Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire and Jack and Jill Politics Jackson, Jesse, Jr. Jackson, Rev. Jesse Jealous, Benjamin Jefferson, Thomas Jewish Americans African American-Jewish relations assimilation of on New York City civilian review board Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire and “job creators” Johnson, Lyndon Civil Rights Act death of events leading to 1968 election and Great Society Hillary Clinton on Civil Rights Act and March on Washington (1963) and Moynihan and Vietnam War and Voting Rights Act War on Poverty John XXIII, Pope Jones, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Van JPMorgan Kasich, John Kasten, Robert, Jr.

Yet Smith deserves credit he rarely receives for assembling the New Deal coalition, even if he would later reject it. The half-Irish working-class son of the Lower East Side, Smith was propelled from state Assembly majority leader to national renown by the galvanizing tragedy of the Progressive era: the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of March 1911. He would become a pivotal figure in the creation of New Deal policy as well as New Deal politics. FDR’s labor secretary, Frances Perkins, called the day of the Triangle fire “the day the New Deal began,” pointing to social welfare legislation Smith pioneered in the aftermath of the tragedy.

assassination of characterization of in Chicago events leading to 1968 election and Hillary Clinton on Civil Rights Act and labor unions and Life on March on Washington (1963) Ocean Hill/Brownsville conflict and Poor People’s Campaign Quill and King, Rodney Know-Nothing Party Koch, Ed Kolchin, Peter Kratovil, Frank Kucinich, Dennis Ku Klux Klan Kuttner, Robert labor unions civil rights movement and declining influence of (1970s) Draft Riots and events leading to 1968 election and Hard Hat Riot and Lindsay and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) complaints Nixon and Reagan and Steamfitters’ Union Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire (March 1911) 2008 primaries See also individual names of labor unions Lacy, Dean LaPierre, Wayne Latinos African American–Latino relations hierarchy of immigrants Ocean Hill/Brownsville conflict and as Republicans (present-day) 2008 primaries See also race relations “Lenny Bernstein and the Radical Chic” (Wolfe) Lewis, Anthony Lewis, John L.


pages: 349 words: 98,309

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

“So it’s really frustrating, but yeah, I took it off and I started doing some exercise, and my back sort of got to somewhat normal now.” Workers getting injured on the job isn’t anything new. The neighborhood where I conducted my research was within walking distance of the Asch Building, home of the notorious 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, in which 143 young women and men perished. The fire was one of the largest workplace accidents in US history and is often considered an impetus for changes to American labor law and for the New Deal.3 A SHORT HISTORY OF WORKERS’ COMPENSATION Workers’ compensation is hardly a new concept.

Although Congress passed the Employers’ Liability Acts of 1906 and 1908, softening the restrictions of contributory negligence, the conditions of workers were still largely ignored.7 In early 1911, the states of Washington and Wisconsin passed comprehensive workers’ compensation laws, but the true movement toward workplace protections and compensation for injury didn’t occur until the March 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.8 In the year after the fire, nine other states passed regulations, followed by thirty-six others before the decade was done. In New York, the fire also led to the development of the Committee on Public Safety, headed by Frances Perkins—the future U.S. secretary of labor—and led to new legislation to protect workers, including the “54-hour bill” granting workers shorter hours.

See also Hello Alfred algorithm-based acceptance and response rates, 5, 55; overview, 2, 5, 6; anti-trust law violations and, 71; deactivation and, 82–83; negative reviews and, 13; opaqueness of, 84–85; TaskRabbit, 1–2 alienation, 37 Amazon Family, 30–31, 73 American labor history: overview, 8, 89; accident rates, 93; breaks, 87; British law and, 64–65; collective bargaining attempts, 64–65; early 20th century strikes, 68–70; early strikes, 64; 19th century strikes, 65–66, 67, 68; piecemeal system, 68; ten-hour workdays, 65; textile industry and, 66–67; Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, 92, 93, 226–27n3, 227n8; unionization attempts, 64–65, 93; workers’ compensation, 92–94 anonymity, 23, 48, 91, 156 apps, 2, 6, 50, 53 Arets, Martijn, 28fig. 2 Arieff, Allison, 231n4 Arkwright, Richard, 66 Aronowitz, Stanley, 37 Asch Building, 92, 226–27n3 Autor, David, 181, 186 background checks: criminal activity and, 140, 144; drivers and, 143; Googling clients, 170–72; screening mechanisms, 113–15; trust and, 29, 208; Uber and, 43, 167 Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, 68, 69 Barnes vs.


pages: 173 words: 55,328

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

That afternoon she was having tea with a wealthy friend whose windows looked out on Washington Square. The noise of shouting and sirens rose from the street, and a butler came in to report a large fire across the park. Perkins rushed outside and saw flames consuming the upper floors of a ten-story building where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company had a factory. Perkins knew the place. Italian and Jewish seamstresses, most in their teens and twenties, had gone on strike to bring changes to working conditions there, including improved fire safety; they’d been beaten and jailed, the effort had failed, and exit doors in the sweatshop remained locked to prevent theft or unauthorized breaks.

The social safety net was so shredded that millions of Americans had to go to work sick or lost health insurance during the pandemic, while state unemployment systems and public health departments nearly collapsed from malign neglect. The workplace safety administration had stopped doing the kind of inspections that were the legacy of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, causing injuries and deaths of American workers to soar. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 is worth barely half its value fifty years ago. Antitrust enforcement leaves monopolies in place while going after smaller competitors that have to cooperate in order to survive. Labor law enforcement consistently favors corporations over unions.

In recent years a new anti-monopoly movement has emerged, partly inspired by the Progressives, with new ideas for the old desire to make all citizens capable of participating in our political and economic life. Its most famous advocate is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who often echoes Brandeis, and who told the story of Frances Perkins one night in a campaign speech in Washington Square, a block from the Triangle Shirtwaist building. A second antitrust age would increase innovation, decentralize power, revitalize depressed regions, and free both workers and small businesses to compete. Its strongest supporters should be Free Americans. * * * Creating the conditions of equality requires new structures and policies.


pages: 592 words: 133,460

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

The eventual arrival to Washington Square Park of the so-called Mink Brigades, wealthy women who came downtown to join the striking seamstresses, helped turn the tide of public opinion by bringing attention to the brutality occurring daily in the park. When the strike ended in February 1910, union contracts had been signed at nearly every shop, although not at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), which had been formed in 1900, but whose membership had languished, exploded in size and strength. Two years later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burst into flames, killing 146 garment workers. This ushered in a new and triumphant era in the battle against sweatshops. Three months after the fire, New York’s governor, under pressure from activists, created a commission that would investigate factories across the state.

According to Rose Schneiderman, “What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist—the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art…. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.” On November 22, 1909, there was an overflow audience crowded in Cooper Union’s Great Hall. In late September, three hundred women workers from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory had gone on strike, and were holding the picket line daily in the cold. While cops turned their backs, paid off with a hundred-dollar bill slipped in a cigar case, according to labor organizers’ accounts, the blows of company thugs rained down on strikers. Defying expectations of established unionists, who did not think either women or immigrant workers could be organized, these three hundred–some Italian and Jewish girls had been conducting an orderly strike for weeks.

Frances Perkins and Robert Wagner, who headed the factory commission, would later help to create the nation’s most sweeping worker protections through the New Deal, in the National Labor Relations Act, guaranteeing federal protection for workers’ right to unionize. More radical still, however, was what the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union would accomplish. The ILGWU gained in size and stature after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and it adopted a strategy that would give responsibility for factory conditions to those who designed, purchased, and sold the garments produced by the small contract shops. About 70 percent of all women’s apparel workers in America were represented by the ILGWU by 1935. By the late 1940s, weekly wages in the garment industry had reached almost 85 percent of those in manufacturing overall.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

We’re trying to change that. And I think we will.”7 CHAPTER 8 1911—2011 History and the Global Labor Struggle FOR GARMENT WORKERS, March 25, 2011, was a critical moment. Hundreds poured into the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Many famous political figures had spoken in the column-lined auditorium during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, President Abraham Lincoln, antislavery activists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Lakota chief Red Cloud and Arapahoe chief Little Raven.

It was the largest women’s strike the country had ever seen.1 In the years that followed, women garment workers across the US organized, struck, and unionized. But they found that unionism could only take them so far. They also needed enforceable labor law. That need was indelibly burned into the national consciousness on March 25, 1911, when a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, in the heart of Greenwich Village, took 146 young workers’ lives. In a terrible half hour, thousands watched as young people jumped to their deaths from eighth-story windows, some burning even as they fell. Between 1911 and 1938, outrage over the fire galvanized support for the passage of minimum wage, maximum hours, and safety laws.

Bangladesh has, since the 1980s, been the threat that hangs over the heads of garment workers the world over, says Cambodian union leader Ath Thorn. “If you keep asking for a higher wage, the factory will close and move to Bangladesh,” his members have been told anytime they ask for raises.3 It took an unbearable tragedy, a twenty-first-century Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, to make Bangladeshi workers finally, painfully, visible to the world. On April 24, 2013, the twenty-first-century garment industry was literally shaken to the ground when vibrations from a thousand sewing machines opened cracks in the Savar building in Dhaka and it collapsed, killing 1,134 workers.


pages: 256 words: 76,433

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline

big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, clean water, East Village, export processing zone, feminist movement, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megacity, messenger bag, Multi Fibre Arrangement, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Skype, special economic zone, trade liberalization, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, Veblen good

In 1909, twenty thousand New York City garment workers, many of them teenage girls, went on strike and demanded better pay and working conditions at their jobs. Garment workers at the time worked thirteen-hour days, had no days off, and made about $6 a week, according to historical information collected by the AFL-CIO. Some of the strikers were beaten up and taken to jail; some were even shot. Among the strikers were workers from the doomed Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which made those ubiquitous turn-of-the-century blouses with the high collar, puffed sleeves, and cinched waists. Two years after the “Strike of 20,000,” the infamous fire at the Triangle factory occurred. The fire caused national outrage, with four hundred thousand people attending the funeral procession in New York.

., 53, 148 Frugal Fashionista, 34 Galliano, John, 115 Gap, 17–19, 23, 24, 29, 30, 52, 53, 70, 79, 87–88, 91, 100–102, 106, 141, 145, 166, 167 factories and, 146, 151 garment factories, 40, 50, 55, 138–60 Alta Gracia, 138–42, 151, 153–59, 216 in Bangladesh, 40–41, 43, 52, 145, 148–53, 165, 181–85 in China, 3, 6, 23, 43, 52, 74, 91, 150, 161–67, 169–71, 173–80, 213 and consolidation of clothing industry, 144 Fair Trade-certification of, 157–59 full-package, 166 import quotas and, 51–52, 54–55 local, 208, 212–15 in Los Angeles, 45–48, 54, 55, 56, 150, 162, 213 move from domestic to overseas manufacturing, 41–42 moving onshore, 213–14 in New York City, 37–41, 44–45, 55–58, 61, 142–43, 144 piece work in, 46–47, 48 safety and working conditions in, 145–50, 156 sweatshops, 44, 142, 143, 146–47, 159, 189, 215 Triangle Shirtwaist, 44, 142–43 unions and, 38, 44, 48, 51, 140–44, 154, 155, 163 wages in, 42–48, 53, 56, 61, 141–44, 146, 150–53, 154, 156, 159–60 Worker Rights Consortium and, 140–41, 142, 152, 158, 159 Garment Industry Development Corporation (GIDC), 36–38, 53, 214 Gas’d, 208 Gere, Richard, 65 Giardina, Sal, 84–85, 167, 171–72, 176 Gifford, Kathie Lee, 146 Gn, Andrew, 75 Goodwill, 119, 126, 127, 131, 132 Goody’s, 22 Gossip Girl, 63, 65, 79 Great American Apparel Diet, 191 Green Shows, 205 Grupo M, 141 Guess?

., 210 recycling: of clothing, 122–23, 125, 128 of textiles, 128–31, 133, 135–37, 212 Reebok, 154 Refashion Co-Op, 201 refashioning, 134, 200–202, 206 ReFashionista, 200 Reference, 46 Reid, Sally, 44, 149–50, 165 Reilly, Joan, 75 repair: of clothing, 132, 193–94, 197, 201, 220 of shoes, 132–33, 218–19 Rice, Paul, 159 Richford, Rhonda, 31 Riley, Robert, 74–75 Rinaldi, Don, 132–33 Roark Collective, 211 Rock & Republic, 66 Ross, Robert, 144 Rucci, Ralph, 71–72, 75 Rudes, Jeff, 43 Rue 21, 2 Rykiel, Sonia, 68, 73 Saipan, 146 Salvation Army, 10, 119–20, 126–27, 130, 136–37 Sanchez, Julio Cesar, 138–39, 140 Sarazcloset.com, 202 Save the Garment Center, 87, 214 Scafidi, Susan, 105–9, 111, 112 Schenkenberg, Marcus, 30 Schrader, Abe, 39, 66, 85 Schullström, Ingrid, 145 Schultz, Lisa, 18 Schwartz, David, 98 Scott, Tristan, 207–12, 215, 217 Ship ’n Shore, 87 shopping malls, 26 ShopSmart, 121 seamstresses and tailors, 9, 10, 42, 58, 80–81, 87, 194 Searching for Style, 65 Sears, 21, 53, 81 Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles (SMART), 130 secondhand clothing, 201–2 exporting of, 135–36, 137 refashioning of, 134, 200–202, 206 thrift stores, 9–10, 119–21, 126–28, 130–32, 136–37, 188–89, 199, 204 see also vintage clothing Service and Style: How Department Stores Fashioned the Middle Class (Whitaker), 20, 80–81, 93 Seventeen, 23, 85–86 Sex and the City, 33, 64, 65, 76 sewing machines, 42, 138–39, 192–96 sergers, 82 sewing your own clothes, 9, 80–81, 85–87, 187–88, 190–200, 206 refashioning used items, 134, 200–201, 206 Sheen, Charlie, 19 shoedazzle.com, 122 shoes, 122, 132 repairing of, 132–33, 218–19 shopping hauls, 13–15, 122 Siegle, Lucy, 125, 135, 136 Simmel, Georg, 115 Single, 213 Six Items or Less, 191 slow fashion, 190, 208–10, 216, 220 slow food, 190, 208 Sonia Rykiel, 68, 73 South China Morning Post, 173 sportswear, 45 Sprigman, Chris, 110 Starbuck, Eliza, 60–61, 73, 89–90, 191, 203–6, 212 Starr, Malcolm, 39 Steele, Valerie, 80, 86, 103–4 Stone, Sharon, 19 Stubin, Eric, 129–31, 133 Sussman, Nadia, 55–56 Swapaholics, The, 202 sweaters, 214 Swimmer, Susan, 19–20 Syracuse University, 146–47 tailors and seamstresses, 9, 10, 42, 58, 80–81, 87, 194 Talbots, 146 Target, 2, 6, 15, 19, 22–24, 30–34, 69, 70, 77, 78, 91, 113, 131, 146, 213, 221 Isaac Mizrahi and, 24, 28, 33, 70 Missoni and, 69–71 Tech Talk, 71 textile manufacturing: in China, 123–24, 165 environmental impact of, 123–25 factories, 48–51, 123–24 with man-made fibers, 83–85, 124–25 textile recycling, 128–31, 133, 135–37, 212 Textile World, 84 Theory, 114 Thomas, Dana, 67, 68 thrift stores, 9–10, 119–21, 126–28, 130–32, 136–37, 188–89, 199, 204 Time, 22, 76, 98, 196 Times (London), 101 T.J. Maxx, 2, 8, 13, 30 TNS Mills, 50 Today Show, The, 19 Tommy Hilfiger, 18, 23, 24, 67, 91, 141, 146 Topshop, 100 Trans-Americas Trading Co., 129–30, 133 Trebay, Guy, 110 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, 44, 142–43 Trovata, 109 Tucker, 114 Ullman, Myron, 95–96 Umbro, 40, 148, 181 Uniform Project, 191 unions, 38, 44, 48, 51, 140–44, 154, 155, 163 UNIQLO, 2, 33, 70 UNIS, 60 UNITE HERE, 48 Universal Studios, 40 Urban Outfitters, 13, 43, 60–61, 73, 204, 205 USA Today, 202 Usigan, Ysolt, 71 Valentino, 62, 63 Van Meter, Jonathan, 17, 19 Variety, 31 Varsity, 148 Veblen goods, 77 Versace, 6 Very Sweet Life, 187–88 Very Sweet Life, 190 VF, 181 Victoria’s Secret, 189 videos, YouTube, 12, 13–15, 122 Vietnam, 165, 180 vintage clothing, 133–34, 135, 201–2, 204 designs copied from, 112–13, 120 refashioning of, 134, 200–202, 206 Vogue, 17, 22, 30, 31, 34, 64, 65, 114, 171 Vogue.com, 113 von Furstenberg, Diane, 62, 110, 171 Wagner, Robert, 143 Wagner, Stacy, 158 Wall Street Journal, 43, 92, 93, 95 Walmart, 2, 12, 13, 15, 18, 23, 24, 26–27, 30, 31, 70, 95, 96, 100, 131, 144, 181 factories and, 144–48, 151, 159 Walton, Sam, 95 Wanamaker’s, 1 Ward, Andy, 36–38, 41, 43, 45, 52, 53, 142, 214 Warner Brothers, 148 Washington Monthly, 53, 148 Washington Post, 132, 185 well-spent.com, 60 What’s in a Dress?


pages: 302 words: 74,350

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

How else does one explain that ghastly thing known as Sarah Palin? All these crazy young ones are lining up to burn in their very own Shirtwaist Factories, screaming that they’re empowered by the very technology that’s set them aflame. Remember, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was one of the great disasters in American life. It happened in 1911 on Washington Square in New York City. It happened in a building that is now part of New York University’s campus. Back in New York, whenever Baby and Adeline had walked past the building in question, Adeline asked odd questions like, “Baby, when you’re attending classes in that building, do you ever feel as if a shade will reach out from the netherworld and clutch you in its grasp?

She had offended advocates of free speech. She had offended people who believed that copyright was copywrong. She had offended people on the Left. She had offended people on the Right. There was anger about her trivialization of the travails of women in the tech sector. There was anger on behalf of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. There was anger on behalf of the Arabs, still locked in political struggle and still not liberated by Twitter or Facebook. There was anger on behalf of the US Constitution, an inanimate document without feelings that had doomed millions to slavery. There was anger on behalf of the victims of incest and sexualized violence.

They were offering services that changed the world and helped individuals achieve their greatest potential. Twitter could not be described as it was: a mechanism by which teenagers tormented each other into suicide while obsessing about ephemeral celebrities and on which Adeline argued about whether or not she hated the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. Twitter was described as an outlet for freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Twitter was changing the world. Twitter was headquartered in the Tenderloin on Market Street. Mayor Ed Lee had some eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. He had given Twitter a $22,000,000 tax break to move into the Tenderloin.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

In the summer of 1877, after New Yorkers came out in support of a national railway workers’ strike, the authorities—fearing a proletarian revolution—called out the National Guard, who descended on the protesters with guns and clubs. In 1886, streetcar conductors, having walked out in support of a twelve-hour workday and a dinner break, responded to police beatings by setting their streetcars on fire. Most notoriously, in 1909, in the largest work stoppage in US history, ladies’ garment workers from New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Company walked out for shorter hours, better pay, and safety. In response, private detectives organized scab labor, and owners hired prostitutes to start fights with striking workers. On Seventh Street, workers packed into Cooper Union college roared in support as Clara Lemlich—a slight, dark-eyed girl who had endured six broken ribs from a beating—urged on the demonstrators.

On Seventh Street, workers packed into Cooper Union college roared in support as Clara Lemlich—a slight, dark-eyed girl who had endured six broken ribs from a beating—urged on the demonstrators. “This is not a strike,” Lemlich cried; “this is an uprising!” Taylor Swift is no Clara Lemlich, of course—either in her personal bravery or in her economic need. But in principle Swift’s withdrawal of her work from Spotify and Lemlich’s withdrawal of her labor from the Triangle Shirtwaist Company aren’t fundamentally different. In both situations, workers have arrived at the last resort, withdrawing their labor from the market in order to reform the system. In both cases they are using one of our five tools to fix not only their future, but the future of generations of workers and artists too.

See also competitive innovation; education; regulation; social responsibility; worker and consumer choice combinatorial strategy for, 42–51 human-centric design, 34–40 open technology platforms, 32–33 overview, 29–32 public sphere, 33–34 regulation, 33 social responsibility for, 40–41 “stack” metaphor for, 32–33, 38, 41 Toyota, 271 Triangle Shirtwaist Company, 229–230 Trump, Donald Bannon and Breitbart News, 94 economic advisory council, 255 on mainstream media as “fake news,” 66 on tariffs, 187 Thiel and, 139 2016 election and millennial electorate, 293 2016 election and Russia’s involvement, 95–97 trust China’s technology initiatives and, 123–124 Edelman Trust Barometer (2017), 15, 65–66, 80, 103, 117 Estonia and government accountability, 78–84 Estonia and government-as-a-service concept, 74, 79, 92–93 Estonia’s technology initiatives and, 87–91 Ilves on “digital identity and trust,” 87–91 public technology as “trustworthy layer,” 148 regulation and, 145–148 Singapore’s technology initiatives and, 116–119 social responsibility and, 198–199, 222–225 trust-busting by Roosevelt as, 127 (See also regulation) Twitter, 33–34, 58 “Two Nations” concept, 36–37, 40, 45, 51 Uber regulation and, 145 social responsibility issues of, 201–202, 220–221, 222 UberEATS, 255 worker and consumer choice issues, 245–257 Union Square Ventures, 166, 168–172, 175, 176, 180, 183, 190, 267 United Kingdom.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

The ladies all rushed outside to find the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, just across the plaza, ablaze. Perkins ran to the factory, in the vain hope of offering some kind of help. Hundreds of workers were trapped inside with no way to escape, and a gruesome scene unfolded, as scores of helpless women and girls jumped to their deaths. Just two years earlier, those same women had engineered a strike to call for more humane working conditions, and a remedy to the very safety concerns that caused the fire. They had been met with violent resistance. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire was a turning point in Frances Perkins’s moral formation, which awakened her to the urgency of fighting for reform.

Overall, however, only about 20 percent of women participated in the formal labor force as the century opened.7 The majority of these working women were single, poorly educated, and from low-income households, and thus seeking wage labor out of necessity.8 Their experience diverged markedly from their more privileged counterparts, and they often faced extremely adverse working conditions, as exemplified by the devastating fire at the New York City Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911, which took the lives of 146 people, most of them immigrant women and girls. The fight for better pay and conditions for working-class women was thus an important early component of women’s activism. But tragedies such as the Triangle fire also galvanized a new generation of middle-class female reformers, who began to argue that as more and more women entered the industrial economy, issues of labor, poverty, and class should play a crucial role in women’s emancipation.

Brooks, 131 Holocaust, 230 homosexuality/gay rights, 138, 141, 180, 192, 376n53 Hoover, Herbert, 66, 75, 76, 173–75 Research Committee on Social Trends, 436n7 taxation and, 58 unions and, 50 War Policies Commission, 175 Hopkins, Harry, 175 housing: access to homeownership, 77, 202, 213–14, 233, 239, 241 home size trends, 23–24 residential segregation, 219–20, 417–18nn68–70 Houston, Whitney, 306 Hout, Michael, 141 How Democracies Die (Levitsky and Ziblatt), 106 How the Other Half Lives (Riis), 167 Hull House, 319, 320, 331–32 identity, 190–91, 243 immigrants and immigration: American Dream and, 3 civic associations and, 110, 115 in the first Gilded Age (late 1800s), 3–4, 5, 7, 32–33 Great Migration and, 419n77 immigration reform and, 82, 222, 297–98, 300 income equality and, 45 I-we-I curve and, 296–98 religion and, 128–29, 132–33 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (1911), 247, 320 Immigration Act (1924), 222, 297 Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), 297–98, 300 Implicit Association Test (IAT), 380–81n86 income equality/inequality: age distribution of income, 59–61 executive compensation, 66–67 gender and, 256–60, 263, 264–65, 431n49, 431–32n56 government transfer payments and, 34, 35, 59–61 Great Migration and, 222–23 immigration and, 45 I-we-I curves, 33–36, 39, 52–53, 59, 63–64, 358–59n29, 363n61 minimum wage and, 54, 62–64, 80, 286, 321, 369nn115–16 race and, 202, 211–12, 241, 259 taxation and, 35, 54–59 wealth distribution and, 37–38, 46–47, 53 see also Great Convergence (1913–70); Great Divergence (mid-1970s–); unions Independent Order of Odd Fellows, 112, 116, 117 Index of Dissimilarity, 260–61 individualism, see cultural individualism vs. community needs Individualism Reconsidered (Riesman), 182 Industrial Revolution, 22, 166 infant mortality, 25–28, 42, 205, 240 infrastructure, in the first Gilded Age (late 1800s), 6 Inglehart, Ronald, 295, 304–5, 439n27 Institute for American Democracy, 231 Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 259 international trade: income equality/inequality and, 45, 364n65 I-we-I curves and, 296–98 International Women’s Strike for Equality (1970), 279 internet, 277, 292, 332–33, 336 Ngram analysis of books, 169–70, 172–73, 175–76, 190–95, 197–98, 311, 402–3nn18–23, 439n27 social media, see social media intersectionality, 245, 427n1, 427–28n10 Interstate Commerce Commission, 74 Interstate Highway system, 80 inverted U-curve, see I-we-I curve(s) isolation, see social solidarity vs. isolation Isserman, Maurice, 136, 300 It’s a Wonderful Life (film), 174 I-we-I curve(s), 12–18 causal analysis and, 286–88, 290–98 civic associations and, 112–13, 118–19, 123, 124–26 cultural individualism vs. community needs, 12–14, 169–76, 179–85, 191–99, 284–86, 339–41 cultural trends and, 10, 11 economic equality/inequality and, 33–38, 41–44, 47–48, 50, 51, 55–64, 67–68, 284–87, 294–96 economic trends and, 9–10 financial regulation and, 62, 63 gender equality/inequality and, 13–16, 281–82 globalization trend and, 296–98 health trends and, 43–44 income equality and, 33–36, 39, 52–53, 59, 63–64, 358–59n29, 363n61 intergenerational economic mobility and, 41, 42 international trade and, 296–98 marriage and, 147–50 nature and derivation of, 12–14, 352–53n4 1960s, as hinge point of twentieth century, 17, 285–86, 298–314 parenthood and, 155–56 pendulum metaphor and, 64, 165, 183–84, 192, 198, 289–90, 437n9 politics/political parties and, 10, 11, 69–71, 86–91, 97, 100–101, 103–8, 284–87 pronoun usage and, 196–98 racial equality/inequality and, 242–44, 281 religion and, 133–35, 139–42 social spending on elderly and poor, 60–61 social trends and, 10–11 social trust and, 159–62 Stimson composite summary curves, 9–11, 352–53n4 Stock-Watson composite summary curves, 352–53n4 taxation and, 55–59 union membership and, 50, 51, 144–45 wealth distribution and, 36–37, 39, 53 in wide-angle approach to history, 283–90 Iyengar, Shanto, 97 Jack-and-Jill, 118 Jackman, Mary, 241–42 Jackson, Jesse, 85 Jackson, Jimmie Lee, 237 Jahoda, Marie, 180–81 Jefferson, Thomas, 81 Jews/Judaism, 134 civic associations, 115, 118, 119, 121, 323 Nazi Germany/Holocaust, 178, 186, 230 Jim Crow segregation, 323–25 Brown v.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Germany: 30 percent of energy comes from renewables US Energy Information Administration, “Germany’s Renewables Electricity Generation Grows in 2015, but Coal Still Dominant,” Today in Energy, May 24, 2016, https://www.eia.gov/​todayinenergy/​detail.php?id=26372. Howard Zinn: “The really critical thing isn’t…” Howard Zinn, Terrorism and War (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 110. Remembering When We Leapt 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City: death toll “The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire,” Occupational Safety and Health Administration website, accessed April 18, 2017, https://www.osha.gov/​oas/​trianglefactoryfire-account.html. When Utopia Lends a Hand Gilded Age strikers: “cooperative commonwealth” Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/​files/​history-culture-society-workshop/​files/​introduction_and_chapter_4.pdf.

In the United States, after the carnage of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Blacks and their radical allies pushed for economic justice and greater social rights. They won major victories, including free public education for all children—although it would take another century before schools were desegregated. The horrific 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City, which took the lives of 146 young immigrant garment workers, catalyzed hundreds of thousands of workers into militancy—eventually leading to an overhaul of the state labor code, caps on overtime, new rules for child labor, and breakthroughs in health and fire safety regulations.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

A cursory review of OSHA reports offers a grim portrait of the industry: “Employee’s arm amputated in Meat Auger.” “Employee killed when arm caught in meat grinder.” “Employee decapitated by chain of hide puller machine.” “Employee killed when head crushed by conveyor.” “Caught and killed by gut-cooker machine.”18 The modern slaughterhouse is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory of the heartland. At the JBS plant where Tin worked—which slaughters 5,400 head of cattle daily—gory industrial accidents and deaths are high above the national average, and contagious diseases spread like gossip because workers are crammed body to body in freezing and unhygienic conditions.

Yet, unions and their allies have always been at the forefront of workplace safety fights. Those fights began long ago, and were often led by pioneering women policymakers, organizers, and scientists. On March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins, then thirty-one, was having tea at a friend’s house when she heard commotion from the street outside. A blaze had engulfed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory down the street, and Ms. Perkins gathered up her skirts and ran toward the smoke. When she arrived, workers, mostly young women, were gathered in the windowsills ten stories up as flames lapped at their backs. “They began to jump,” Perkins said later. “The window was too crowded and they would jump and they hit the sidewalk.… Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed.

In the end, their respective careers brought them both closer to workers and men in power, and their theories of social change were more aligned than is often thought. Policy is only useful to workers when they have the power to defend it. Such was Perkins and Schneiderman’s effect that their living enemies recognize their potency even today, decades after their deaths. In March 2011, almost one hundred years to the day after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Maine’s anti-union Republican governor Paul LePage removed a thirty-six-foot-wide mural from Augusta’s Department of Labor’s building and remanded it to a secret location. Among the mural’s eleven panels are scenes from Maine’s labor history, one of which contains a portrait of Perkins, who was born in Maine, and Schneiderman.


The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, business logic, Cass Sunstein, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, IBM and the Holocaust, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, new economy, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl

Patricia Anderson's family's burns-externalities; Wendy D's exploitation and misery-externalities . These and a thousand other points of corporate darkness, from Bhopal and the Exxon Valdez to epidemic levels of worker injury and death and chronic destruction of the environment, are the price we all pay for the corporation's flawed character." The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster stands as a notorious example of a company's callous disregard for its employees. The owners of the factory in lower Manhattan's garment district had kept their employees, mostly young immigrant women, locked in to prevent them from leaving their workstations and thus slowing production .

Just two years earlier, sixty thousand New York City garment workers, led by the recently formed International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, had taken to the streets to protest sweatshop conditions, low wages, and unsafe workplaces in what came to be known as "The Great Revolt." In the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory blaze, half a million people protested in the streets of New York. The union continued to press for legal protections of workers, though it was not until 1938 that sweatshops, child labor, and industrial homework were finally banned by President Franklin Roosevelt's administration 's Fair Labor Standards Act.


pages: 353 words: 110,919

The Road to Character by David Brooks

Cass Sunstein, coherent worldview, David Brooks, desegregation, digital rights, Donald Trump, follow your passion, George Santayana, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, New Journalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, you are the product

Perkins spoke in the upper-crust tones befitting her upbringing—like Margaret Dumont in the old Marx Brothers movies or Mrs. Thurston Howell III—with long flat a’s, dropped r’s, and rounded vowels, “tomaahhhto” for “tomato.” A butler rushed in and announced that there was a fire near the square. The ladies ran out. Perkins lifted up her skirts and sprinted toward it. They had stumbled upon the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, one of the most famous fires in American history. Perkins could see the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the building ablaze and dozens of workers crowding around the open windows. She joined the throng of horrified onlookers on the sidewalk below. Some saw what they thought were bundles of fabric falling from the windows.

He shoved them aside and barreled his way onto the elevator and to safety. The fire department arrived quickly but its ladders could not reach the eighth floor. The water from its hoses could barely reach that high, just enough to give the building exterior a light dousing. Shame The horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire traumatized the city. People were not only furious at the factory owners, but felt some deep responsibility themselves. In 1909 a young Russian immigrant named Rose Schneiderman had led the women who worked at Triangle and other factories on a strike to address the very issues that led to the fire disaster.

And one sees this in people with a vocation—a certain rapt expression, a hungry desire to perform a dance or run an organization to its utmost perfection. They feel the joy of having their values in deep harmony with their behavior. They experience a wonderful certainty of action that banishes weariness from even the hardest days. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire wasn’t the only event that defined Frances Perkins’s purpose in life, but it was a major one. This horror had been put in front of her. And like many people, she found a fiercer resolve amid a flood of righteous rage. It wasn’t just that so many people had died—after all, they could not be brought back to life; it was also the “ongoing assault on the common order that the fire came to symbolize.”


pages: 239 words: 62,311

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset light, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business logic, capital controls, clean water, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, means of production, mobile money, Multi Fibre Arrangement, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tacit knowledge, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population

Rather than curbing industrialization to prevent its excesses, the experience of countries that have already developed show that paradoxically, further industrialization that leads to further excesses is what eventually creates the political and social pressures for regulation and reform. The history of labor protection laws in the United States makes this abundantly clear. Basic safety regulations were enacted only after horrific industrial accidents galvanized the public to press for reform. In 1911, a fire erupted at the Triangle shirtwaist factory, where young female workers had been locked in by an unsympathetic foreman, killing 146 young women in the deadliest workplace accident in New York City’s history. This tragedy was also the city’s deadliest building fire until September 11, 2001. Only in its sad aftermath were thirty-six new state laws regulating workplace safety conditions passed, even though the young women who worked and died in the factory had been agitating for better conditions for a year before the fire.11 Similarly, it took six disastrous mine blasts in 1940 for the US government to finally begin mine inspections.12 The point is not that these accidents were somehow necessary, or that we shouldn’t work toward better working conditions and accident-prevention mechanisms, but that history shows effective regulation to always come after industrialization swings into full motion, not before.

., 17–19, 21, 22–23, 73–74 supply chains, 55–57, 113 Taiwan, manufacturing in, 19, 26, 29, 184n6 Taiyuan clothing factory, 71–72 Tanzania, 41, 157 Teachers Service Commission (TSC), 131 technology automation and, 9, 55, 58–61, 172–173 downtime from malfunctioning, 114, 115 obsolete, 37 test and learn approach, 145–146 textile manufacturing, 61–66 Asian, 39 automation in, 58–61 clothing manufacturing vs., 52 Nigeria, 33–41 Thatcher, Margaret, 20 Thompson, E. P., 98, 101–102 time, concepts of, 101–103 timeshare models, 133–134 traded sectors, 94–95 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 72 Transparency International, 77, 136–137 transparency programs, 82 Triangle shirtwaist factory, 83 Trump, Donald, 72, 174 trust, 110, 123–124, 126 in local institutions, 140–141 Tung, Lawrence, 31–32, 42, 45, 61 Turkana Boy, 175 “Unable to Remain in Africa, Unable to Go Back to China” (Xiao Nie & Sang Bu), 125–126 undertakers, 85 unemployment rates, 94 union movements, 8, 102–105 women in, 102–107 working conditions and, 79–81 United Nations, 20, 93–94 Conference on Trade and Development, 146 Millennium Development Goals, 22, 153 United Nigeria Textiles, 35 United States entrepreneurial failure rates in, 114 investment in Africa, 43 labor protection laws, 83 peak manufacturing employment in, 93 size of economy in, 179n2 trade policy with Lesotho, 66, 72 USAID, 154 Uzbekistan, 73–74 Vaccine Alliance, The, 154 Vietnam, 60–61 Vodacom, 146 Vodafone, 143–144 Volkswagen, 2 vulnerable jobs, 94 Walmart, 47, 56, 95 Wang Yuan, 129–132 Washington Consensus, 20–22, 29–30, 37, 135, 180n4 Weber, Max, 135 WeChat, 124–127 Wempco, 31–32 Williamson, John, 180n4 women, in union movements, 102–105, 106 worker skills training, 129–134 working environments, 79–81 World Bank, 20–21, 37, 63, 73, 94, 114–115, 159, 174 World Health Organization, 157 World Trade Organization, 162 Wu, Mr., 84–85, 93 Xi Jinping, 173–174 Xue, John, 138–140 Zaf Gebretsadik, 120–123, 127 Zi Ran, 124–127 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful to the people whom I’ve had the privilege of writing about in this book.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

“This is about responsibility and it’s about basic human morality.” Walmart did its best to downplay the bus tour, dismissing it as “a union-funded publicity stunt.” But the unrelenting onslaught from both Wake Up Walmart and Walmart Watch had, without question, succeeded in making the company “nearly as infamous as Enron or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory,” as Salon magazine characterized it. Lee Scott called the unions’ barrage “one of the most organized, most sophisticated, most expensive corporate campaigns” ever waged. No longer, though, was Walmart going to just sit there and get pounded. The week before the UFCW bus took to the road, the company fortified itself and prepared to hit back hard.

“I would have thought if Walmart was this bad… we’d have people falling all over themselves: ‘Let me tell you about this, let me tell you about that,’” he said. “That was not there at all. These were very proud Walmart employees.” The reality was, even back when Walmart was being spoken of in the same breath as Enron and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, there were still many workers who were grateful to the company for the opportunities it gave them. Trying to make sense of it all was a bit like parachuting into a big city and asking, “Is this a good place to live?” Well, what neighborhood are you in? Who are you talking to? With more than a million workers and constant turnover, Walmart was always going to be a corporate Rashomon.


pages: 264 words: 74,785

Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class by Edward McClelland

collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, Ford Model T, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair

(Later, she, like the sit-down strike’s organizers, will attempt to conceal this affiliation.) On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, Perkins is drinking tea with a wealthy patron on Washington Square, when her hostess’s butler informs the women that the screams and fire bells they’re hearing from the street are responses to a fire at a nearby clothing manufacturer, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Rushing outside, Perkins witnesses dozens of young women jumping from the high windows—the only way to escape the fire, since the doors have been locked to prevent the employees from leaving the factory floor. In the aftermath of the fire, which claims 146 lives, Perkins is appointed executive director of a Committee on Safety, formed by New York State to advocate for labor and workplace safety laws.

See arrests/violence Toledo, Ohio: Chevy transmission plant strike, 27–28, 60; Toledo Agreement, 161–62, 165 Trade Union Unity League, 22 Transue, Andrew Jackson, 122–23 Travis, Bob: during evacuation march, 177; and GM’s removing of dies at Fisher One, 48; organizing activities, 27–29, 80, 86–87, 107–8, 150; personality, 141; preparations for striking, 33–34, 139–41; prosecution of, 103; response to National Guard troops, 86 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 114 unemployment insurance, 12 union organizing. See labor organizing, unions United Auto Workers of America (UAWA/UAW): chartering of, 17; Cleveland Fisher Body strike, 47–48; convention in South Bend, 19; decision to strike against GM, 12, 43, 48, 49, 139; demand for recognition/ exclusive bargaining rights, 58–59, 72, 104, 119, 151–52, 162–63; and the development of a true middle class, 185–86; election of Martin to head, 19; formation and membership, 12; impacts of the Flint strike, 179, 181–85; Local 156, 19, 22, 25, 27, 42, Local 581, 187, 44; membership increase following successful Fisher One sit-in, 39; negotiations/agreement with GM, 45, 99, 110, 150, 171–72, 179; recruitment of members, 40–41; sympathy strikes, 81.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Employee pushback got the board disbanded, but the company now has no AI ethics board, nor is it required to have one.15 Labor unrest and consumer complaints can only pressure corporations into better behavior when governments enforce laws and regulations meant to protect our lives instead of the companies’ bottom lines. In 1911, workers throwing themselves out of the upstairs windows of a burning factory in New York City sparked a worldwide labor movement. These workers, mostly young immigrant women, jumped from the top floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory because the building was on fire and they had been locked in by their employers. In this case, the horror of seeing more than one hundred crumpled, charred bodies laid out on the city streets was able to shock the world, and particularly the wealthiest and most powerful in New York society, into believing how bad things had gotten, winning them over to the workers’ side.

See also Gender inequality anti-, 144 Ferraiolo, Angela, 235 Fibonacci sequence, 275–277 Fido, Bulletin Board System, 322–324 FidoNet, 322–326, 327, 333 demise, 326 nodes, 322–324 zonemail, 322 Fire crisis, 6, 22–24, 159 crowded theatre, 363, 373 flames, 267, 368 gaming, 233, 242, 245 infrastructures, 313–333 passim, 322 optimism, 309 physical, 5, 44, 321 pyrocene, 364 spread, 6–7 and technologies, relationship to, 13, 111, 313 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, 22 typography, 213, 227 your computer is on, 4, 232 First Round, 265 Fiber optic link around the globe (FLAG), 101 FLAG, 101 Flanagan, Mary, 235 Flickering signifier, 284 Flores, Fernando, 79 Flowers, Tommy, 143 Forecasting, 6, 57, 110 FOSS (Free and open-source software), 191 414 gang, 287–288 Fowler, Susan, 254 France (French), 39, 117, 145, 216, 219, 221, 320 French (language), 341, 344, 380 Free and open-source software, 191 Free speech, 59, 61–62, 373–374 Friedman, Thomas, 308 Friendster, 17, 313 Future Ace, 299 Games big game companies, 245–246 computer, 232–233 limits of, 232–233, 243, 244–245 rhetoric vs. reality, 232 skinning, 233–236 video, 241, 246 Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO), 58 Gates, Bill, 18, 29 Gem Future Academy, 299 Gender inequality, 4–6, 8, 21, 136, 184, 187, 381 artificial intelligence, 121, 127–128 British civil service, 140, 144–145, 148, 150–152 hiring gaps, 253–257, 259–260, 267, 367 and IBM, 159–175 passim internet’s structural, 97, 99, 102, 109–110 and robotics, 199–204 stereotyping, 106 technical design, 370 of work, 302–303, 307–309, 367, 375 Gender Resource Center, 298 Gendered Innovations initiative, 200 Germany, 221, 290, 341 IBM and West, 160–161, 166–175 Nazi, 15, 63, 143 Gerritsen, Tim, 238 Ghana, 45, 149f, 330 Gilded Age, 13, 32 Glass ceiling, 136, 143 Global North, 191, 324–325 Global South, 91–92, 94, 309, 325, 333, 367 Global System for Mobile (GSM) Communications network, 327–328 Global Voices, 331 Glushkov, Viktor M., 77–78, 83 Google, 5, 7, 84, 87, 160, 201, 254, 263, 318, 321, 329, 333 advertising, 136–137 Alphabet, 31, 54 AlphaGo, 7 business concerns, 17 Docs, 224 Drive, 224 employees, 23, 207, 262 ethics board, 22 hiring, 257 Home, 179, 180, 184, 189, 190t image recognition, 4, 120 original motto, (“don’t be evil”), 17, 22 Photos, 265 search, 66, 203, 328 voice recognition, 188 Graham, Paul, 256 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, 245 GRC (Gender Resource Center), 298 Great book tourism, 366–367, 374 GreenNet (UK), 324–325 Grubhub, 210 Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network, 327–328 GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) network, 327–328 G-Tech Foundation, 298, 301 Guest, Arthur, 217 Hacking, 15, 81, 87, 256, 266, 287, 291 hacker, 263–264, 266, 287, 291 tourist, 100–102 Haddad, Selim, 216–218, 220 Hangul, 7, 341–344, 351 Hanscom Air Force Base Electronic Systems Division, 274 Harvard University, 14, 257, 349 Hashing, 57, 66, 124–126, 129 #DREAMerHack, 266 #YesWeCode, 253, 264–266 Hayes, Patrick, 52 Haymarket riots, 168 Health insurance, 53 Hebrew, 217, 222, 224–225, 341, 343–344, 354 Henderson, Amy, 265 Heretic, 237 Heterarchy, 86t, 87 Heteronormative, 139, 154 Hewlett-Packard, 318 High tech, 12–13, 21, 35, 37, 46, 147–148 sexism in, 136–138, 152–153 High-level languages (HLL), 275, 277–278, 284, 290 Hindi, 190, 215, 342, 355f Hiring.

See also Accent, bias; Voice technologies Stalin, Joseph, 78 Standard Oil, 31 Stanford University, 200, 209, 257 Star Wars: The Old Republic, 243–244 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), 4, 7–8, 257 Stephenson, Neal, 102–104, 106–107, 110 Stevens, Ted, 97–98, 101 Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, 118 Streaming, 5, 118 Strife, 237 Subaltern, 304, 306 Surveillance, 74–75 carceral state, 208 corporate, 4, 19 data, 206 global, 86–87, 119 mass network, 85 network, 72, 85 National Security Agency, 99, 103 state, 78, 86–88, 86t, 130 technology, 126–127, 129, 308 Swift, 275 Switchboard, 191 Syria, 216, 219 Tajikistan, 227 Tanzania, 188, 189t, 330 Tata, 103 TCP/IP (Transmission control protocol/internet protocol), 317, 323 IP (internet protocol) blocking, 57 Technocrat, 21, 79, 142, 151 Technologists, 4, 85, 345, 365, 368, 373 diverse users, 154 history, 369, 371 and language, 338–339 women, 144 Technology bias, 214, 218, 232 Cold War, 17–18, 94, 137 Digital, 40, 64, 123–124, 200, 382 and dying well, 378 emergent, 199 and empire, 19, 187 environment and, 44–46, 76, 321, 339 Euro-American, 100, 221 fire and, 13, 111, 313 gender inequality in design, 370 inequality and, 152–154, 227, 309 information, 15, 30, 32, 40, 110, 291, 298, 308 large technical systems, 316–317 and modernity, 98 and oppression, 179, 200, 202, 204, 372–373 progress, 19–20, 65, 98 and racism (see Racism) small, 219–220 speech (see Voice technologies) surveillance, 126–127, 129, 308 technocolonialism, 103–104 technocrats, 21, 79, 142, 151 technologists (see Technologists) technoneutrality, 4 technophobia, 3, 363, 365 techno-utopia, 4, 365 training, 253–254, 265 Technoneutrality, 4 Technophobia, 3, 363, 365 Techno-utopia, 4, 365 Telecommunication companies, 13, 35, 87, 93, 155 cable-laying, 101, 103–104 India, 330 network, 315, 325 Telecom Regulatory Authority, 330–331 Telepresence, 5 Terms of usage, 4 Tesla, 45 Tetris, 234–236 Thailand (Thai), 102, 342, 354 Thompson, Ken, 273–275, 277, 286–289, 291–292 “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” 273–274, 278 Thompson hack bootstrapping, 281–284 in real life, 289–291 replication, 278–281 Trojan horse, 284–286 Tiltfactor Lab, 235 T9, 7 Toyota, 175 Train, 234 Transgender people, 136, 141 Transportation, 30–31, 37, 319 Travel narratives, 101 Treadmill of reforms, 78 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, 22 Trinidad, 184–185, 193, 367 Trojan Horse, 273, 284–292 Trucking, 30, 46, 313 Trump, Donald J., 20, 23, 54, 207 Trust, problem of, 36, 38 Tumblr, 224 Turing, Alan, 18 Turing Award, 273 Turkopticon, 370 Turkey, 62–63, 214, 216, 218–219 Twitter, 12, 17, 54, 322, 379 and diversity, 254, 260–261 and Donald Trump, 20, 54 and language, 214, 227 as news media, 23 and policing, 120 2K Games, 237 Typeface, 216–218, 225 Typewriter (typing), 41, 337 Arabic, 213–221 Arabic language and software, 221, 223, 227–228 Chinese, 346, 350 electric, 220–221 mechanical typesetting, 339–340, 357 Mingkwai, 346–349, 347f, 353 orthographies, 341–344, 346, 350, 353–354, 356 QWERTY, 342–343, 349–350, 354 Siamese, 343 typing as obstacle, 356 typographic imperialism, 226 Underwood Typewriter Company, 218 Uber, 23–24, 31, 35, 254, 261, 267 and systems, 313, 319, 332 Uber Eats, 210 UGC (user-generated content), 54–56, 61–62, 66 Uighur, 227 Underrepresented, 253–255, 258–260, 264–267 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), 304, 309 Unions, 23–24, 159–160, 368, 373 IBM in Germany, 170–172 IBM in the United States, 161, 166–167, 173–175 India, 301, 308 United Arab Emirates, 226 United Kingdom, 83 accent bias, 180–183, 182t, 185–186, 188, 190t Anglocentrism, 344 civil service, 138–139, 141, 144, 150 classism, 138–139 early computing leader, 138 empire, 381 industrial technology, 221, 327 Ministry of Technology, 150 NGO (nongovernmental organization) networks, 324 Shirley, Stephanie “Steve,” 143–147, 146f Submarine cable networks, 93 United Kingdom (cont.)


The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

NYU and south of the square The south and east sides of the square are lined with bulky New York University buildings, although even nonstudents will be interested in the university’s innovative Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square E (Tues, Thurs & Fri 105 The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire THE WE S T V I L L AGE One of New York’s most infamous tragedies occurred on March 25, 1911, at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, when a fire started on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist garment factory, one of the city’s most notorious sweatshops. A terrible combination of flammable fabrics, locked doors, collapsing fire escapes, and the inability of fire-truck ladders to reach higher than the sixth floor, resulted in the deaths of 146 workers – almost entirely women, primarily immigrants, and some only 13 years old – in less than fifteen minutes.

Nearly half its residents were foreign-born, with Ellis Island, the depot that processed arrivals, handling two thousand people a day. Many immigrants worked in sweatshops for the city’s growing, notoriously exploitative garment industry. Although workers began to strike for better pay and conditions, it took the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (see p.106) to rouse public and civic conscience; within months the state passed 56 factory-reform measures, and unionization spread through the city. On the upside of New York’s capitalist expansion, the early 1900s saw some of the city’s wealth going into adventurous new architecture.

(Experimental Theater Club) ................ 362 New York Theater Workshop ...................................... 362 Ontological-Hysteric Theater ...................................... 362 Performing Garage........... 362 P.S.122 ............................. 362 St Ann’s Warehouse......... 362 Theater for the New City... 363 Tribeca Performing Arts Center ........................... 363 Tiffany & Co............75, 130 time................................. 39 Time & Life Building ..... 150 Time Warner Center .... 189, 390 & New York Architecture color section Times Square .......33, 143, 147–149, 422, 441, 452 Times Tower ................. 148 Tin Pan Alley................. 116 TKTS.....................148, 360 Tompkins Square Park ...............................93, 98 tour companies ........22, 23 tourist offices.........33, 245, 256 tours......................... 33–35 Tower of Freedom .......... 55 & New York Architecture color section trains...................19, 23, 24 transit information .......... 23 travel agents.............22, 23 travel insurance .............. 36 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire ...........................106, 436 Tribeca...................... 71–74 Tribeca ........................... 72 W Waldorf-Astoria Hotel ...................124, 134, 281 Walker, Jimmy ......108, 436 477 I ND E X | 478 walking ...................30, 154 walking tours .................. 34 Wall Street ....... 50–54, 436 Warhol, Andy .........93, 115, 119, 142, 170, 181 Washington, George...... 52, 56, 60, 104, 117, 213, 215, 263, 434 Washington Heights ........... 202, 214, & Ethnic New York color section Washington Heights .... 212 Washington Market Park ..................................... 73 Washington Mews........ 107 Washington Square ..... 101, 104–106 Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge........ 230 Water Street ................... 60 Water Taxi Beach ......... 247 Wave Hill...............256, 263 Weather Underground, the ................................... 107 Weeksville & Ethnic New York color section ................................... 236 West Broadway .............. 77 West Indian-American Day Parade ............237, 420 & Ethnic New York color section West Village......... 101–110 West Village ......... 102–103 bars .................................. 345 cafés..........................295–297 restaurants ................317–320 Wharton, Edith......436, 445 White Horse Tavern ...... 114 Whitman, Walt ............ 222, 223, 435 Whitney Museum of American Art.............. 180 Wildlife Refuge, Jamaica Bay ............................ 255 Williamsburg .............. 219, 241–243 & Ethnic New York color section Williamsburg Bridge ...... 91, 243, 452 Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower ......................... 225 Winter Garden ................ 59 Wollman Memorial Rink ................................... 155 women travelers ............ 40 Woodlawn Cemetery .... 263 Woodside...........245, 251 & Ethnic New York color section Woolworth Building ....... 64, 65, 66, 436 & New York Architecture color section work visas ...................... 37 working.......................... 37 World Financial Center…55, 59 World Trade Center ....... 50, 54, 55, 56, 71, 438, 439 & New York Architecture color section Y Yankee Stadium......... 256, 258, 404, 410 YMCAs ......................... 287 yoga.............................. 415 Yonah Schimmel’s ......... 90, 293 Yorkville ........................ 184 Z Zabar’s Café .........197, 301 Zenger, John Peter......... 53 Map symbols maps are listed in the full index using colored text 0ROVINCIALªBOUNDARY (OSPITAL )NTERSTATE 0OSTªOFlCE 53ªHIGHWAY )NTERNETªACCESS 3TATEªHIGHWAY ,IGHTHOUSE 4UNNEL -ONUMENT &ERRYªROUTE 3YNAGOGUE 2AILWAYª "UDDHISTªTEMPLE 0EAK #EMETERY )NTERNATIONALªAIRPORT #HURCHªTOWNªMAPS 'ATE 3TADIUM 3UBWAYªSTATION "UILDING 0OINTªOFªINTEREST #EMETERY 4OURISTªOFlCE 0ARKFOREST 'ARDENS "EACH | ,IGHTHOUSE MAP SYMBOLS #HAPTERªBOUNDARY 479 We're covered.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

Kristof reminds us that just a century ago the United States suffered similar growing pains on its march toward industrialization and prosperity. Such arguments, while compelling, tend to oversimplify historic events. Workers’ rights in this country were forged in a crucible that was highly visible to consumers. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, the worst workplace disaster in the history of New York City for ninety years, ignited the American labor movement for the very reason that the victims of this tragedy were within sight of other Americans, most of them workers themselves. It is this identification that led to the strikes, riots, and union efforts that forced reform.

Sold American (McGovern) Southdale Spartan stagflation staleness factor standard of living post-World War II era during World War II, Starbucks steam engine Stichting Ingka Foundation strikes subsidies, farm subsistence farming suburbs decentralized shopping Korvette’s move into Subway Sudan Summers, Lawrence supermarkets Suri, Rajneesh ”A Survey of Outlet Mall Retailing: Past, Present and Future” (Coughlan and Soberman) Sysco Corporation tainted goods, from China Target taste, cheap food and Taylor, Frederick Winslow television Testament of a Furniture Dealer, The (Kamprad) textile industry Thailand Thaler, Richard Thomas, Dana thrift Tiffany Time Timmer, Peter Tommy Bahama ”Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice” (Thaler) toy imports traditional marketplace Treasure Island Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 Truman, Harry Trump, Donald Tversky, Amos Two Guys Ultimatum Game unemployment in 2008, Feds targeting of employment to fight inflation in Great Depression Uniform Product Code [UPC] unions. See labor unions United Auto Workers United Steelworkers Union United Textile Workers U.S.


pages: 109 words: 39,462

Do You Mind if I Cancel?: (Things That Still Annoy Me) by Gary Janetti

Golden age of television, hiring and firing, index card, rent control, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

During this time, I’m working the overnight shift four days a week. I’m off the other three. More time to not write. I live in a sixth-floor walk-up on Christopher Street in a rent-controlled apartment. The kind of tenement building that you usually see in movies about Italian immigrants or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Walking my bicycle up and down the six flights of stairs to ride to and from the hotel. In my early twenties I work as a bicycle teen-tour leader for American Youth Hostels, an organization that has long since gone out of business, probably because they had people as unqualified as myself leading their tours.


pages: 369 words: 121,161

Alistair Cooke's America by Alistair Cooke

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, Ford Model T, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, interchangeable parts, joint-stock company, Maui Hawaii, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

There must be no more ‘hyphenated Americans.’ Roosevelt’s aim was a double one: to liberate the immigrant from his daily grind in a polyglot compound, and to set him free from the hampering liabilities of his native tongue. The first aim did not begin to be achieved until 1911, when there was an appalling fire in New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. It took a hundred and forty lives, roused the needle workers to go on strike, and wakened the public conscience. And at the end of it, the airless sweatshop, with its two exits leading to one rickety staircase, was abolished by New York State law. So was the peddling out of piecework to the immigrant’s home.

John 51, 52–3 Smith, Sir Thomas 49 Smithsonian Institution 288 Spanish explorations 20–37. see also New Spain Spice Islands 21 Staël, Mme de 205 Stamp Act 78, 92 Standard Oil Company of Ohio 195 Stanford, Leland 174 steamboats 151, 152 steel industry 196–7 Stevenson, Adlai E. 225 stock market crash (1929) 245–6 stockyards 176 Strategic Air Command 272–6 suburbs 283–5, 286 Supreme Court 113–16, 155, 156, 164, 222, 223, 249, 289, 290 Sutherland, Justice George 115 Sutter, Johann August 135–6 Szilard, Leo 263 Taft, William Howard 224, 225 Talleyrand, Charles 129 Tammany organization 217, 230 taxation of the colonies 77–9, 81–2 Tecumseh (Shawnee chief) 132 telegraph, invention of 190 Teller, Edward 263 Thoroughgood, Adam 55 Tippecanoe, battle of 132 tobacco 52–3, 55, 56 Tocqueville, Alexis de 13, 15, 153 Tojo, Gen. Hideki 259 Torrio, Johnny 245 Toussaint L’Ouverture, Pierre 128 Townsend, Charles 79 Tracy, Marquis de 40–41 transcontinental railroad 171–5 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory 225 Truman, Harry 164, 235, 247, 266, 290 Tudor, Frederic 282–3 Turkey Red wheat 11, 178 Turner, Nat 291 Twain, Mark 1, 4, 7 Tweed, William Marcy “Boss” 217 United Nations 102, 266–8, 271, 293 United States Steel Corp. 197, 223 Ustinov, Peter 71 Valley Forge, Pa. 89, 293 Vanderbilt, Cornelius 200 Vanderbilt, William K. 201 Verrazano, Giovanni 37 Versailles, Treaty of 231, 231–2, 234 Vespucci, Amerigo 19 Victoria (queen) 119, 178, 181, 206 Vietnam War 269–70 Vinci, Leonardo da 22 Voltaire 46 wagon trains 137–43, 145 Walker, Thomas 123 War of 181–2, 132 Warren, Chief Justice Earl 116, 290 Warren Joseph 80 Washington, George 74, 78, 87–90, 91, 99, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, no, 132, 162, 209, 253, 254, 258, 293 Washington, Martha 88, 89 Wells, H.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

The iron and steel industry after 1870 gradually eliminated hot and dangerous jobs. Hideous conditions in meat-packing and other food-related industries were substantially improved during the Progressive Era of 1900–1920. Sweatshops producing apparel in appalling conditions attracted the searchlight of public opinion after the catastrophic New York Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, a precursor of the deadly conditions in Bangladesh apparel factories revealed in recent years. A consistent theme of working life before 1940 was its insecurity, including not only the risk of cyclical unemployment, but also of arbitrary dismissals when a firm fired an employee who was no longer capable of doing brute-force labor, as well as the risk of seasonal or firm-specific plant shutdowns that left the worker before 1940 without any income at all.

The female immigrant workers who dominated work in the apparel industry, in addition to receiving low wages and working long hours, suffered from unsafe working conditions. Needles could pierce fingers and sometimes require finger amputations. Workers were typically locked in the rooms. Perhaps the best-known disaster in U.S. manufacturing history was the New York City Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in March 1911, in which 148 employees died, most of them young women, in conditions very similar to those of the Bangladesh clothing factory fires of 2012–13: As flames spread throughout the eighth floor, workers jumped to their deaths. Scores of charred bodies were found piled against closed doors.

., 196, 414 music, 411; digital media for, 435–38; on phonograph records, 186–90, 204, 411; post-World War II, 427–29, 439; on radio, 192, 195, 196, 421 Myspace (social network), 456 Nader, Ralph, 400 nails, 110 narcotic drugs, 222–23 National Broadcasting Company (NBC), 194, 413 National Bureau of Casualty and Surety Underwriters, 309 National Bureau of Standards, 562 National Cancer Act (1971), 470 National Industrial Recovery Act (1933–1935), 542 National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act; 1935), 543 natural gas, 634 NBC Symphony, 196 Nelson, Richard, 573 Netflix, 436–37 net investment, 586–87 networks: for cell phones, 430–31; Internet as, 442–43, 453–57; for medical care, 494–95; radio, 194; social, 456–57; television, 416–17, 425–26 Newcomen,, Thomas, 568 New Deal, 15, 18; legislation and programs of, 315–17; Social Security during, 516; wages increased during, 541–43, 548 new molecular entities (NMEs), 479 New Orleans, Battle of, 4 news, 433–35; Internet for, 443; movie newsreels, 200; post-World War II broadcasting of, 411; radio broadcasting of, 196; World War II broadcasts of, 413–14 newspapers, 172, 174–77; in 1870, 49; decline of, 433–35 Newsweek (magazine), 434 New York (New York): air travel between Chicago and, 396–97; air travel between Los Angeles and, 398; bacteriological laboratory in, 218; buses in, 160; early television in, 415–16; elevated trains in, 147; General Slocum disaster in, 239; housing in, 102–3; Ladies’ Protective Health Association in, 221; long-distance telephone service for, 183, 185; omnibus service in, 143–44; rail transport between Chicago and, 133, 135, 136, 140; subways in, 130, 148; tenements in, 97; Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in, 272; World’s Fair (1939–1940) in, 356, 363, 413, 592 New York Stock Exchange, 582 nickelodeons, 198–99, 205 Nixon, Richard, 357, 419 nonwhites: life expectancy of, 212; See also blacks Nordhaus, William: on global warming, 634; on Moore’s Law, 446; on price of light, 119; on value of health and life expectancy, 242–44, 323 nursing schools, 230 nutrition.


pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

In Warren’s little apartment in Frankfurt, packed with deserter revolutionaries, Cooky Pollack told stories of pre-war radicalism. She spoke of her flight from Russia after the failed 1905 revolution. How she’d done political organizing among the cloth cutters and prostitutes of New York. She told the story of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 New York garment workers, mostly Jewish immigrants like her, were burned or choked to death; how some had jumped to their deaths because the owner had locked the exits to prevent workers taking unauthorized breaks. She told them of the optimism she had felt in the 1920s and ’30s.

John Bosco High School Stockholm Stockholm Research Collective Stockholm University Stone, Roger Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, “Star Wars”) 175 Strollo, Vincent Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Suall, Irwin Suburban Life Sullivan, Ed Svahnström, Bertil Swarthmore College Sweden deserters find asylum in draft resisters find exile in EAP and elections of 1968 elections of 1979 elections of 2014 GLADIO and Palme assassination and political neutrality of public cools toward American exiles in Vale moves to welfare state withdraws asylum for deserters Sweden: Heaven and Hell (film) Swedish Aliens Commission Swedish anti-war movement Swedish Committee for Vietnam Swedish Death Index “Swedish Deserters” (CIA précis) Swedish Film Institute Swedish intelligence Swedish Ministry of the Interior Swedish National Archives Swedish police Sylvia, Robert Symbionese Liberation Army Syvriotis, Nick Takman, John Talbott, Strobe Tarpley, Webster Tate, Charles Tavistock Institute Taxi Driver (film) Taylor, Thomas Tegin-Gaddy, Kerstin Temple University, Third World Solidarity rally Terrorists, The (Sjöwall and Wahlöö) Terry Whitmore, for Example (film) There Are No Naughty Children (Israel and Israel) They Would Have Died Anyway (Ekberg) Third State of Imperialism, The (LaRouche) Thorsson, Inga Three Fs of Charm, The (Foley) Tibet Tidsignal (student newspaper) Time Time to Live, A (film) Tito, Josip Broz Tokyo University Tomkiewicz, Stanislaus Torres, Jose Torsåker farm torture Tracy, Spencer Trap, The (TV drama) Treml, Vladimir Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Trier, Lars von Trotsky, Leon Trotskyists Trotsky: The Prophet Armed (Deutscher) Trump, Donald Trump, Melania Tuesday (newspaper supplement) Turgenev, Ivan Turk, Larry Turkish-Syrian border Turner, Stansfield Tyresö suburb UFOs Ukraine Ulvaeus, Björn Umiliani, Piero Underground Railway Underwood, Lamont Claxton Union of American Exiles in Britain United Committee of South Slavic Americans United Nations Conference on the Human Environment United Press International (UPI) U.S.


Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling

Berlin Wall, Burning Man, Donner party, East Village, financial engineering, illegal immigration, index card, medical residency, pre–internet, rent control, Saturday Night Live, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

I know the demographic for Ghostbusters is teenage boys, and I know they would kill themselves if two ghostbusters had a makeover at Sephora. I just have always wanted to see a cool girl having her first kiss with a guy she’s had a crush on, and then have to excuse herself to go trap the pissed-off ghosts of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire or something. In my imagination, I am, of course, one of the ghostbusters, with the likes of say, Emily Blunt, Taraji Henson, and Natalie Portman. Even if I’m not the ringleader, I’m definitely the one who gets to say “I ain’t afraid a no ghost.” At least the first time. Contributing Nothing at Saturday Night Live I WAS A dreadful guest writer on Saturday Night Live.


pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

Other companies in the sector—notably HP—have similarly accepted greater responsibility to ensure adherence to labor and environmental standards among their principal suppliers, with notable success.47 But two tragedies in Bangladesh reemphasized the fragility of such monitoring arrangements in the presence of the competitive pressures placed on extended supply chains. In late 2012, a factory fire at Tazreen Fashions, a large Bangladeshi apparel company, killed 112 workers. Conditions that resulted in the deaths had parallels with the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 in New York City: locked fire exits, supervisors demanding that workers return to their stations in the face of alarms, and people jumping to their deaths from a burning building. Notably, the facility provided products for a number of major U.S. brands and retailers and had been covered by a workplace monitoring arrangement with Walmart, one of its major customers.48 Less than six months later, in April 2013, a multistory building in Savar, Bangladesh, collapsed, killing 1,127 people who worked in the numerous apparel manufacturing companies located in it.

May, 342n17 Trade: and supply chains, 168–171; benefits of, 337n27 Transaction cost economics, theory of, 30–31 Transocean, 19 Transparency: as regulatory instrument, 234–235, 241, 349n63; in international supply chains, 262–264; political economy of, 349n66 Transparency in Supply Chains Act (California), 356n49 Triangle Shirtwaist, fire at, 176 T. Rowe Price, 46 Trucking, and information costs, 61–62 Turfer model of subcontracting, 94–95, 109–111 Ultimatum game, 82, 310n11 United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), 101–104 United Service Companies, 157 UNITE HERE!, 155, 365n36 UPS, 57–58; as logistics provider, 161 Ureche, Tudor, 3, 113 U.S.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

The centre itself, operated by the American Institute of Architects, is a bright and stylish hub for conferences, lectures, film screenings and off-site tours (check the website for details). The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire One of New York’s most infamous tragedies occurred on March 25, 1911, at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, when a fire started on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist garment factory, one of the city’s notorious sweatshops. A terrible combination of flammable fabrics, locked doors, collapsing fire escapes and the inability of fire-truck ladders to reach higher than the sixth floor resulted in the deaths of 146 workers – almost all women, primarily immigrants, and some only 13 years old – in less than fifteen minutes.

Nearly half its residents were foreign-born, with Ellis Island, the depot that processed arrivals, handling two thousand people a day. Many immigrants worked in sweatshops for the city’s growing, notoriously exploitative, garment industry. Although workers began to strike for better pay and conditions, it took the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to rouse public and civic conscience; within months the state passed 56 factory-reform measures, and unionization spread through the city. On the upside of New York’s capitalist expansion, the early 1900s saw some of the city’s wealth delving into adventurous new architecture.


pages: 196 words: 57,974

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Yet, between 1897 and 1904 union membership multiplied almost fivefold. In 1906, the AFL began to focus on electoral politics, supporting Democratic Party candidates and forming close relations with the big political machines that now dominated city politics. Union bosses seized on tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York in 1911 to agitate for safer working conditions. In 1914, the Wilson administration granted unions immunity from antitrust suits, and in 1916, it passed a series of bills that restricted working hours and child labor. Politicians also slowly succumbed to popular pressure to break up the empires of the “malefactors of great wealth.”


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Among the many casualties, one proprietor of a large paper mill in Lambertville, New Jersey, got his clothing caught in the shafts and “was thrown violently to the floor and the top of his head was torn off.”14 Another engineer in Newark, New Jersey, was “crushed to a pulp” after he was trapped in the shafts of the engine. Beyond machinery accidents, explosions and fires were a constant threat. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in New York City, described by the news media as the “the worst calamity that has befallen us since the burning of the Slocum,” cost the lives of 148 workers, most of them young women.15 As fire ravaged the factory, many people jumped out of the windows—only to be picked up either squashed or fearfully injured.

., 90 3D printing, 22 three-field system, 42 Tiberius, Roman Emperor, 40 Tilly, Charles, 58 Tinbergen, Jan, 14, 213, 225 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 147, 207, 270 Toffler, Alvin, 257 Torricelli, Evangelista, 52, 76 tractor use, expansion of, 196 trade, expansion of, 68 trade unions, emergence of, 190 treaty ports, 88 Trevithick, Richard, 109 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (1911), 194 truck driver, 340–41 trucker culture, ending of the heyday of, 171 Trump, Donald, 278, 280, 286, 331 Tugwell, Rexford G., 179 Tull, Jethro, 54 Turing test, 317 Turnpike Trusts, 108 Twain, Mark, 21, 165, 208 typewriter, 161–62 typographers, computer’s effect on jobs and wages of, 247 unemployment, 246, 254; AI-driven, 356; American social expenditure on, 274; average duration of, 177; blame for, 141; fear of, 113; mass, fears of, 366; technological, 12, 117 union security agreements, 257 United Auto Workers (UAW) union, 276 United Nations, 305 universal basic income (UBI), 355 universal white male suffrage, 270 unskilled work, 350 urban-rural wage gap, 209 Ure, Andrew, 97, 104, 119 U.S.


pages: 641 words: 182,927

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

It was the Homestead strike outside of Pittsburgh that ensnared Carnegie and Frick and the Ludlow massacre in Colorado that besmirched Rockefeller’s reputation, not anything that took place in Manhattan or Brooklyn. By contrast, the worst labor incident of this period in New York City, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, involved a small company owned by a pair of Russian Jews (Max Blanck and Isaac Harris) that had subcontracted much of the work to other immigrants. They were decidedly not part of the upper class. A similar ownership pattern typified the garment companies that were caught up in the massive strikes led by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union before World War I.

., 224–26 Tories. See Loyalists Torrey, John, 159–60 Town & Country magazine, 249, 308, 316–18, 326, 328–29, 464n104 Town Topics, 201, 202–3, 233 trading post, New York City as, 1–2, 4 transportation revolution, 88–89 Treaty of Westminster, 15 Tredwell, Seabury, 114–18, 115, 124, 124 Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, 182 Trollope, Fanny, 180 trusts, in late-19th century, 183–84 Tucker, St. George, 63, 67 Tuxedo Club, 288–89 Twombly, Henry B., 273 Union Club, 104–5, 171–72 Union League Club: clubhouse reception, 196; expanding membership in, 200–201; founding of, 407n44; ideological contribution of, 138; moral leadership and, 150–55, 408–9n58 universities, social mobility and, 329–40 University Cottage Club, 330 upper-class households, mid-19th century, 114–26, 115.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

As an adult, Pete has experienced so many injuries to his left knee that his leg may require amputation. Why does this happen? Because people with congenital analgesia lack the feedback to prevent the injurious behaviors that pain warns us about. Many regulations arise from pain. I learned in grade school about the horrible fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan on March 25, 1911, when 146 young garment workers—129 women and 17 men—died, many by jumping from the flames from the upper stories of the factory building. New York State passed sixty new laws regarding worker safety over the next two years and new organizations such as the American Society of Safety Engineers were formed.

., 100 Sobel, Russell, 206 social Darwinism, 215 social exclusion, 85–86 social media, 55, 270, 405 Société Générale, 60–61 Society of Mind, The (Minsky), 132–133 sociobiology, 170–174, 216–217 Sociobiology (Wilson), 170–171 Solow, Herbert, 395 Soros, George, 6, 219, 222–223, 224, 227, 234, 244, 277 sovereign wealth funds, 230, 299, 409–410 Soviet Union, 411 Space Shuttle Challenger, 12–16, 24, 38 specialization, 217 speech synthesis, 132 Sperry, Roger, 113–114 “spoofing,” 360 Springer, James, 159 SR-52 programmable calculator, 357 stagflation, 37 Standard Portfolio Analysis of Risk (SPAN), 369–370 Stanton, Angela, 338 starfish, 192, 242 Star Trek, 395–397, 411, 414 stationarity, 253–255, 279, 282 statistical arbitrage (“statarb”), 284, 286, 288–291, 292–293, 362 statistical tests, 47 Steenbarger, Brett, 94 Stein, Carolyn, 69 sterilization, 171, 174 Stiglitz, Joseph, 224, 278, 310 Stocks for the Long Run (Siegel), 253 stock splits, 24, 47 Stone, Oliver, 346 Stone Age, 150, 163, 165 stone tools, 150–151, 153 stop-loss orders, 359 Strasberg, Lee, 105 stress, 3, 75, 93, 101, 122, 160–161, 346, 413–415 strong connectedness, 374 Strong Story Hypothesis, 133 Strumpf, Koleman, 39 “stub quotes,” 360 subjective value, 100 sublenticular extended amygdala, 89 subprime mortgages, 290, 292, 293, 297, 321, 327, 376, 377, 410 Sugihara, George, 366 suicide, 160 Sullenberger, Chesley, 381 Summers, Lawrence (Larry), 50, 315–316, 319–320, 379 sunlight, 108 SuperDot (trading system), 236 supply and demand curves, 29, 30, 31–33, 34 Surowiecki, James, 5, 16 survey research, 40 Sussman, Donald, 237–238 swaps, 243, 298, 300 Swedish Twin Registry, 161 systematic bias, 56 systematic risk, 194, 199–203, 204, 205, 250–251, 348, 389 systemic risk, 319; Bank of England’s measurement of, 366–367; government as source of, 361; in hedge fund industry, 291, 317; of large vs. small shocks, 315; managing, 370–371, 376–378, 387; transparency of, 384–385; trust linked to, 344 Takahashi, Hidehiko, 86 Tanner, Carmen, 353 Tanzania, 150 Tartaglia, Nunzio, 236 Tattersall, Ian, 150, 154 Tech Bubble, 40 telegraphy, 356 Tennyson, Alfred, Baron, 144 testosterone, 108, 337–338 Texas hold ’em, 59–60 Texas Instruments, 357, 384 Thackray, John, 234 Thales, 16 Théorie de la Spéculation (Bachelier), 19 theory of mind, 109–111 thermal homeostasis, 367–368, 370 This Time Is Different (Reinhart and Rogoff), 310 Thompson, Robert, 1, 81–82, 83, 103–104 three-body problem, 214 ticker tape machine, 356 tight coupling, 321, 322, 361, 372Tiger Fund, 234 Tinker, Grant, 395 Tobin tax, 245 Tokugawa era, 17 Tooby, John, 173, 174 tool use, 150–151, 153, 162, 165 “toxic assets,” 299 trade execution, 257, 356 trade secrets, 284–285, 384 trading volume, 257, 359 transactions tax, 245 Treynor, Jack, 263 trial and error, 133, 141, 142, 182, 183, 188, 198, 265 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 378–379 tribbles, 190–205, 216 Trivers, Robert, 172 trolley dilemma, 339 Trusty, Jessica, 120 Tversky, Amos, 55, 58, 66–67, 68–69, 70–71, 90, 106, 113, 388 TWA Flight 800, 84–85 twins, 159, 161, 348 “two-legged goat effect,” 155 UBS, 61 Ultimatum Game, 336–338 uncertainty, 212, 218; risk vs., 53–55, 415 unemployment, 36–37 unintended consequences, 7, 248, 269, 330, 358, 375 United Kingdom, 222–223, 242, 377 University of Chicago, 22 uptick rule, 233 Urbach-Wiethe disease, 82–83 U.S.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

In these disease-breeding holes we, the youngsters together with the men and women toiled from seventy and eighty hours a week! Saturdays and Sundays included! . . . A sign would go up on Saturday afternoon: “If you don’t come in on Sunday, you need not come in on Monday.” . . . Children’s dreams of a day off shattered. We wept, for after all, we were only children. . . . At the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, in the winter of 1909, women organized and decided to strike. Soon they were walking the picket line in the cold, knowing they could not win while the other factories were operating. A mass meeting was called of workers in the other shops, and Clara Lemlich, in her teens, an eloquent speaker, still bearing the signs of her recent beating on the picket line, stood up: “I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy.” . . . “Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth, like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you— Ye are many, they are few!” The conditions in the factories did not change much. On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company that began in a rag bin swept through the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, too high for fire ladders to reach. The fire chief of New York had said that his ladders could reach only to the seventh floor. But half of New York’s 500,000 workers spent all day, perhaps twelve hours, above the seventh floor.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964. *Lerner, Gerda, ed. Black Women in White America. New York: Random House, 1973. *______. The Female Experience: An American Documentary. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977. London, Jack. The Iron Heel. New York: Bantam, 1971. Naden, Corinne J. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, March 25, 1911. New York: Franklin Watts, 1971. Sanger, Margaret. Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentano’s, 1920. Schoener, Allon, ed. Portal to America: The Lower East Side, 1870–1925. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Harper & Row, 1951.


pages: 300 words: 81,293

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

The writer Henry James described skyscrapers as the “monsters of the mere market,” overshadowing churches, which were “mercilessly deprived of their visibility.”9 A landscape architect saw the towers as “a revolt against the laws of Nature . . . piling humanity up in heaps like bees or ants, absorbing and disgorging them twice a day until the streets become too narrow for the traffic and the sewers too small for the drainage they have to carry away.”10 Soon enough, disaster struck. In 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a ten-story building. The owners, fearing theft, had blocked the only accessible fire exit. The fire became the deadliest industrial disaster in New York, killing 146 garment workers, including girls as young as fourteen. In response to this tragic fire, the city created its first high-rise building code.


pages: 295 words: 89,280

The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Columbine, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, impulse control, Jony Ive, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, theory of mind, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, twin studies, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Clothing makers Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were so concerned with cutting losses at their sweatshop on the upper floors of a building near Washington Square Park in Manhattan that they locked the doors from the outside to prevent their workers—mostly young women and girls—from making off with the merchandise. The company was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, and when a fire broke out there on March 25, 1911, many of the trapped girls had no choice but to jump to their deaths on the sidewalk below. Ultimately, 146 of them perished. The workplace has never been a democracy, and it wasn’t designed to be. Companies without a clear organizational chart and well-defined lines of power sound wonderfully collaborative, except for the fact that they almost always fail.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Members of the IWW worked toward the elimination of the capitalist state, which they thought to be incompatible with democracy.40 They also campaigned in favor of free speech, suing state and local governments, and their radicalism left them open to state repression.41 In New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, garment workers’ unions, supported by the Socialist Party, mounted great strikes under the aegis of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL).42 White, male craft union leaders asserted that employees could negotiate fair contracts with their employers; women employees, who were paid less as a matter of course, did not agree.43 The WTUL supported “protective legislation” that used assumptions about women’s greater physical weakness or their importance as mothers to target women for shorter hours and for minimum wages. Protective legislation established entities like wages boards and arbitration tribunals and supported the appointment of female factory inspectors, interposing the power of the state between employer and employee.44 The sacrifice of 146 women to industrial excess in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire showed just how necessary these protections were. The employers of these young, immigrant workers had locked the exit doors of the building in order to deter theft, so that women had a choice between flinging themselves from the ninth-floor windows of the ten-story Asch building or burning to death.45 Democrats and Republicans attempted to appeal to workers by claiming that their platforms promoted economic prosperity for all.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Furthermore, he argues, “Having slipped catastrophes like the 1914–1945 worldwide conflicts (with 100 million dead), or the nuclear threat of the 44 cold war years that followed, there are also reasonable grounds to believe we can work out our problems. The daily advances in science and technology lend hope that on balance things can be even better.”17. Unfortunately for them, the nineteen-year-olds whose futures were blown to pieces at Verdun, Iwo Jima, or Khe Sanh; the young immigrant women incinerated in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire; and the kidnapped slaves from Africa worked to death on cotton plantations did not “slip the catastrophes” of history. We cannot ask them if their sacrifices were worth it. If we could, it is unlikely that most of them would have volunteered to die or suffer in order to produce our world.


pages: 366 words: 109,117

Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City by Neal Bascomb

buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, pneumatic tube, Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

The board positions at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and Riordan’s County Trust Company eased some of the financial pressure of losing his salary, grand residence, staff, and the only job he had known for the last decade. Still, he was a career politician without an office to hold, and his supporters, some of whom were among the reporters crowded in his living room, wanted Al Smith to have a mission, much as he had in fighting for the rights of the underclass, most famously in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire that claimed 146 lives, the majority teenage immigrant girls. In the eight months since his defeat, he refused to comment much on the mayoral election slated for that fall, nor on how Hoover was faring in the White House. Today, he was surrounded by reporters for the first time in months, brushing off their incessant questions: Would he reenter politics?


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

,” New Yorker, September 10, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy. employment in sweatshops doubled: “History of Sweatshops: 1880–1940,” National Museum of American History, https://americanhistory.si.edu/sweatshops/history-1880-1940. “broad discretion in the investigation”: Karen Bilodeau, “How the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Changed Workers’ Rights,” Maine Bar Journal 26, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 43–44. Though telegraphs were expensive: Richard Du Boff, “Business Demand and the Development of the Telegraph in the United States, 1844–1860,” Business History Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 459–79. “was able to charge monopoly prices”: Tim Wu, “A Brief History of American Telecommunications Regulation,” Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History 5 (2007): 95.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

But this is a clinical examination of conservative governance, not a catalog of horrors, and once we have recovered from our initial shock, what intrigues us about this story is how, with no evident expertise in nineteenth-century history, the leaders of the Saipan garment industry proceeded to reconstruct the “satanic mills” of a century before in astonishing detail: the indebted workers, the company stores, the tricks used to extract unpaid hours, the exits that one researcher found to be nailed shut. A nice touch, that last. Very Triangle Shirtwaist. Very realistic. This wasn’t the work of some robber-baron reenactment club, however. It was simply the market doing what the market will always do, should it somehow get loose from the political cage. The animal is predictable. It will bid wages down and push profits up by any means it is permitted to use.


Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, blue-collar work, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Edward Jenner, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Herman Kahn, informal economy, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mass immigration, Menlo Park, nuclear winter, oil shock, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Productivity paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Robert X Cringely, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, sugar pill, systems thinking, technoutopianism, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

Tragedies still happen in manufacturing and food processing—for example, the fire at the poultry processing plant operated by Imperial Food Products in Hamlet, North Carolina, which claimed twenty-five lives in September 1991. But this was far from the record toll of 145 in the fire eighty years earlier at New York's Triangle Shirtwaist Company; and while Triangle's owners were never charged, the owner of the North Carolina plant accepted a twenty-year prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter. Between the 193os and the 199os, worker death rates fell 75 percent. In California, there were only eighteen deaths per 100 million hours worked in 1985, down from 127 in 1939• 6 None of this implies that workers are now adequately protected from potential trauma.


pages: 510 words: 138,000

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Donald Trump, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, quantum entanglement, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, wage slave, War on Poverty, working poor, young professional

Like the way in which an entire society, regardless of individual affiliations, can internalize and metastasize bad ideas as solid actualities despite all the evidence to the contrary. Like how if there is a hell, every American citizen is going there and when we arrive we will see these images projected on rocky walls in a random and repeating order: a manacled slave, a Cherokee walking on bloody stumps, the charred flesh of a woman throwing herself out of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a Vietnamese girl inhaling Agent Orange, a queen being bashed at the corner of Sullivan and Houston, and a ten-year-old Chinese boy building a television. Like the way my mother used to tuck me into bed when I was eight years old. Like the way that my father hugged and kissed me. Like the way that my family wouldn’t tell me that my grandmother was dead until she was buried.


pages: 1,199 words: 332,563

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition by Robert N. Proctor

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", bioinformatics, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, facts on the ground, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, index card, Indoor air pollution, information retrieval, invention of gunpowder, John Snow's cholera map, language of flowers, life extension, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, speech recognition, stem cell, telemarketer, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

A Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) editorial from 1986 deplored the “tobaccoism holocaust,” and Michael Rabinoff in his 2006 book, Ending the Tobacco Holocaust, highlights tobacco’s unparalleled carnage while deploring complacency: “and yet we do nothing.” Similar expressions can be found prior even to the Second World War, as when Max MacLevy in his 1916 Tobacco Habit Easily Conquered pointed to news reports of “fresh holocausts on the altar of the nicotine devil,” referring to the many lives lost from fires caused by cigarettes (the Triangle Shirtwaist conflagration in New York City, just to name one example). The word holocaust means literally “total burning,” with the added implication of catastrophe, malfeasance, and crimes against humanity. The death of one innocent is sometimes said to be the death of all humanity—and there is great truth in this—but the Holocaust also teaches us that ethics often has much to do with scale.

The largest single industrial accident in the United States was directly caused by smoking: in 1947 careless handling of cigarettes was blamed for igniting 2,600 tons of ammonium nitrate on a ship in the harbor of Texas City, Texas, killing six hundred people and causing an explosion so powerful it knocked planes from the sky. Smoking caused the crash of a Russian-made Ilyushin-18 plane on Christmas Eve 1987 at Canton, killing twenty-three passengers. And cigarettes caused the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, killing 146 New York City garment workers. Tobacco fires don’t get a lot of attention, but in the United States alone from 1970 through 2000, fires killed about four thousand people per year, with about a quarter of these being traceable to cigarettes.11 The tragedy is magnified by the fact that it is not that hard to make (relatively) fire-safe cigarettes: all you have to do is wrap a few tiny bands of thickened paper around the rod; these bands extinguish the cigarette unless a smoker is actively pulling on it, preventing a dropped cigarette from kindling a fire.


pages: 514 words: 153,092

The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, electricity market, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, jobless men, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, plutocrats, short selling, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

Frustrated town leaders would send a wire to their senator, Hugo Black: “Telegram you received from Muscle Shoals this morning framed by city fathers, in City Hall by light of kerosene lamps, though within 2 miles of tremendous power tumbling to waste over Wilson Dam with administration’s consent.” Factories were another area that might be improved by foreign study. From the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, in which close to 150 perished, to the sweatshops of the West Coast, American industrialization seemed to them not progress but proof that Thomas Hardy was right: factories debased. Stuart Chase, for one, was hoping Soviet industry might provide a model to solve some of these problems.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

The match girls at Britain’s Bryant and May factory worked from 8am in winter and 6.30am in summer and continued until 6pm, with breaks of 30 minutes for breakfast and an hour for lunch. The work was done standing up and paid 4 shillings a week, but girls could be fined 3d for talking or going to the toilet without permission.96 In 1911, 146 workers died (123 of them women) when the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York caught fire. The owners had locked the doors to the stairwells to prevent theft and unauthorised breaks.97 The growing militancy of unions across Europe worried governments, who feared that they might form the basis for a broader revolutionary movement. This may have encouraged some governments to take a more aggressive approach to foreign policy and to use patriotism as a way of distracting workers from their economic concerns.


The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York by Caro, Robert A

Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, benefit corporation, British Empire, card file, centre right, East Village, Ford Model T, friendly fire, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Right to Buy, scientific management, Southern State Parkway, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Now the face bent over the pile of bills was Considerably fuller than the face that had been bent over the pile seven years before; it was redder and its teeth, once so white, were capped with gold and yellowed by the cigar butts clenched unendingly between them. Now there was a considerable paunch beneath the pinstripes. But the face still bent over the bills. And now a new element was added to the background of the picture. Sweatshops didn't close on Saturday, and on the Saturday afternoon of March 26, 1911, hundreds of employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, most of them girls from the Lower East Side, were still bending over swatches of material on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of a building overlooking New York's Washington Square. Someone in the tenth-floor work- room lit a cigarette and tossed the match away. It hadn't burned out when it fell into the ankle-deep litter around the sewing machines.

.\ plans for, 900-1; rush hour, 931; Triborough aid for, proposed, 918-19, 920, 1118, 1119; see also transportation: mass transportation; and individual lines traffic congestion, 926, 940; and accident rates, 914; aggravated by more construction, 515-18, 897-8, 9iiI2 > 930; increased, 5^5, 516-20, 715, 836, XXXll TRANSPORTATION (cotlt.) 885, 895, 900, 956-8; Long Island, 515, 516-17, 519, 545, 943-4, 949-51, 955-8; RM's solutions, 515-18, 525, 556, 669, 895-7, 900, 902, 905, 911-12, 918, 949, 950; and need for mass transportation, 515, 614, 897, 901-3, 1072; N.Y.C., 20, 328-31, 34i, 515, 516-19, 525, 545, 547, 563-4, 610, 614, 639, 742, 765, 769, 786, 895, 900, 902-6 passim, 910-17, 942; public and, 914; public resignation about, 912-13, 914, 917-18; see also individual roads Transportation Workers Union, 757, 759 Travia, Anthony, 1124-8 Triangle Shirtwaist Company, 122-3 Triborough Bridge, 6, 340-4 passim, 360, 386-95, 396-7, 454, 493, 508, 517, 619, 628, 633, 659, 898, 923, 925, 1129, 1147; approaches to, 386, 390, 391, 392-3, 448, 476-7, 626, 838; CWA employees for, 392, 394; cost, 391-2, 626; earnings, 617-18, 698; funds for, 387-95 passim, 428, 435-6, 439; opening of, 441-3, 516; tenant eviction for, 386; traffic congestion on, 516, 517-18, 715, 897, 912, 913 Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority: amendments to, 625-31; audit of, 716-17 and n.; autonomy, 13-16, 17-18, 640, 657, 716, 1140; banks and, 18, 725, 733-5, 927, 934, 1048; Battery Crossing fight, 645-7, 653, 657-75, 676; bonds, 345, 625, 730-4, 750-1, 762, 920; bonds, covenants of, 1119, 1120, 1122, 1128, 1134, 1137-8, 1139-41; bonds, interest rates on, 732; bonds, underwriting of, 18, 733, 734; cooperation with Port of N.Y.


pages: 1,169 words: 342,959

New York by Edward Rutherfurd

Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, illegal immigration, margin call, millennium bug, out of africa, place-making, plutocrats, rent control, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, the market place, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban renewal, white picket fence, Y2K, young professional

Every evening, he and Angelo would wait beside the statue for Anna to appear. Sometimes she’d be told she had to work late; and if she didn’t appear, he’d take Angelo back. But usually she arrived, and then they would all walk home together, once in a while stopping for an ice or a cookie on the way. Anna was happy. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company, as it was called, occupied the top three of the ten floors of the big square building. The factory mostly made the ankle-length skirts and the white, narrow-waisted, Gibson Girl blouses, called “shirtwaists,” that were fashionable for working girls and women. Most of the work was arranged at long tables where rows of sewing machines were driven by a single electric engine.