Social Security Turns 91

This week’s post is a bit of a cheat in that I am re-purposing an essay I wrote seventeen years ago for the NH Business Review and Jeff Feingold. I have good reason for using the old essay. FDR signed the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935. Social Security was the brainchild of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Labor Secretary and the first woman to hold a cabinet position. Perkins was a social worker in New York City when, as all my Sunday School students know, she happened upon the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was a sweatshop populated by immigrant women located on the 8^th, 9^th and 10^th floors of the Asch Building. The building is gone now. A plaque on an NYU building silently marks its place.

When a fire broke out, the Triangle women found a key exit door was locked, the elevator did not work and the fire escape was not up to the task. One hundred forty six garment workers perished in the fire, some jumping to their deaths in scenes similar to the 9/11 tragedy. The fire spurred Perkins and other reformers to action, many from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

Before I present my essay, I should note that my friend Christian Urrutia, who is running for Congress in CD-1 (Manchester, Laconia and the Seacoast), supports saving Social Security by removing the cap on Social Security contributions so that the wealthiest lawyers and businessmen stop paying into the Social Security fund at a rate less than teachers, firefighters, cops, and most normal people. Right now, a fat corporate CEO earning $1 million in wages pays an effective rate of less than 1.5 percent into Social Security while a teacher earning $70,000 pays the full 6.2%. I believe most of the candidates running for the Democratic nomination support Christian’s position on removing the cap. I am unsure of the Republicans’ position on removing the artificial cap.

November 6, 2009

I was first introduced to Kate Alterman during law school, though I didn’t know her name for many years. She was an immigrant girl who worked in the factories of New York. It was her work in a particular factory that eventually brought Kate into contact with Max Steuer, one of the most famous trial lawyers of her time. The event that brought Steuer and Alterman together was the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that occurred on March 25, 1911. Frances Perkins, the first woman appointed to a federal cabinet post, is also a part of this story.

A well-regarded evidence professor used Steuer’s example to teach cross-examination. He sternly admonished us never to allow a witness to repeat harmful testimony. Steuer broke this rule when defending the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory who were prosecuted for locking the factory doors and thereby preventing escape from the fire. Steuer cross-examined the immigrant girl by asking her to repeat her testimony about the locked door. He realized in the repetition that she had omitted a piece of her description and asked her to start anew. She did so, correcting her oversight. Steuer used the girl’s memorized testimony to argue that her story was a practiced fabrication and won an acquittal of the factory owners.

It was only years after law school that I learned the name of the witness, Kate Alterman, and that she was new to America and spoke English as her second language. This factory was full of immigrants, mostly from Italy and Eastern Europe. Most were teenaged girls. Some were legal and some, like my grandfather, were quasi-legal.

Kate Alterman, it turns out, did practice her testimony over and over, but not because it was a fabrication. She practiced because she was afraid to make a mistake in her new language.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory made women’s garments. Its conditions were unsanitary and unsafe. The young women who worked in the factory were paid pitifully, many by the piece. When the fire engulfed the eighth, ninth and 10th floors of the Asch Building where the company was located, the workers learned that the elevator did not work, the outside fire escape gave way under the weight of those fleeing and, indeed, a door that led to a stairway was locked. The factory did not have sprinklers and the hoses and ladders of the New York City Fire Department could not reach these upper floors.

Frances Perkins happened onto the fire that Saturday and saw workers perched on the ninth floor window sills between engulfing flames and fire department nets too frail to the task of catching them. One hundred and forty-six workers died in the fire, hundreds more were injured. Workers compensation funds did not exist. Death benefits were unheard of. Years later, the factory’s insurers paid about $75 in compensation to families of the workers who had died.

Perkins helped form the New York State Factory Commission, which was created in the aftermath of the fire to review conditions in the sweatshops. Four years later, based on the commission’s work and lots of work by organized labor, New York had its first comprehensive package of worker safety and wage protection laws.

Twenty years or so after the fire, FDR appointed Frances Perkins to be his Secretary of Labor. Many of the laws first adopted through Perkins’ work on the Factory Commission became federal law under Roosevelt. These laws were directly influenced by what Perkins had witnessed that tragic Saturday in March 1911.

For some time, I have felt that I owe Kate Alterman an apology for misunderstanding her role in the trial. She was a witness who, like many witnesses, tried too hard. I did not bother to learn why or to learn the context of her efforts. My view was much too narrow and overly focused on Steuer and what there was for me to learn from him. I did not question my professor and I missed learning of the factories of Steuer’s time and the ill treatment of the immigrants – “aliens” in today’s parlance – in those factories.

A lasting vision of justice cannot be achieved through such a limited perspective. I hope, over the years, that I have learned to do better.

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Best,

Andru