The building is still there, by the way. The triangle shirtwaist building is now called The Brown Building and it’s just off Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village in NYC. My partner Lenny pointed it out to me on one of our first strolls around the neighborhood. The building really looks like a triangle, because it’s part of that odd phenomenon of Broadway cutting through the numbered avenues at a sharp angle. The Flatiron Building is another of the famous triangle-shaped buildings in New York City.

Lenny’s mother was a dirt poor Polish Jewish immigrant garment worker. She raised him in a cold-water, six-story walk up she could barely afford on her grim piece-work pay in the 1930s... just to show that things didn’t change very quickly or fundamentally for garment workers, most of them women and children.

Things still haven’t changed. The garment industry still makes its bones exploiting women and children paid unconscionably low wages in terrible conditions. We just don’t see it much in North America anymore, because we’ve moved it overseas and out of sight.

Then just to make things even more fun, designers, fashion executives, and retail chains make enormous profits on garments the women and children themselves get paid almost nothing for and often ruin their health for.

The fashion industry will tell you that things have become a lot better for overseas garment workers. Don’t believe them. They are lying through their teeth, and they know it.