The Uprising Of The Twenty Thousand By Clara Lemlich

On November 23, 1909, the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand” started in New York City when a group of women led by Clara Lemlich, a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and who worked at the Triangle Waist Company, rallied thousands of other female workers to decide to strike the Triangle Waist Company and other businesses such as the Leiserson Company and the Rosen Brothers . Clara Lemlich conducted a secret meeting with other women workers to decide whether or not to go on strike to try and improve their work environment, establish and have the backing of a union, more pay, less working hours and many more demands . The strike was almost ruined from the start when the two bosses of the Triangle Waist Company, Isaac Harris and Max

The women would had experienced anything from sexual harassment, rubbed up against or felt on, to being locked into a room until they had finished their shift . Often the bosses would refer to the young preteen or teenage girls as the “working girls” . The working conditions of the women and young children could only be described as slave conditions, one worker described her experience while working for the Triangle Waist Company, “[w]e were like slaves,’ complained one women. ‘You couldn’t pick your head up. You couldn’t talk. We used to go to the bathroom,’ but ‘we hardly had time to wash our hands” . Women would be fined if they were caught talking on the job, disrespectful, or taking a break. The excuse that was used by Harris and Blanck were that they were not working so they should not get paid. Women were forced to work in conditions called “Sweating” which was described by Joe Ann Argersinger in The Triangle Fire: A Brief History with Documents as “overworking and underpaying [the workers]” . There was a sign posted above a door in one of the work rooms that stated, “If You Don’t Come In On Sunday, Don’t Come In On Monday”