By Jeffrey Page

It is 2012. We’re supposed to have advanced over the last 100 years. We’re supposed to be smarter, maybe even more compassionate. Workers are supposed to be better off. Management is supposed to be more enlightened. But I’m sitting here looking at The Times’s account of two clothing factory fires in Pakistan and the deaths of 300 workers, young people for the most part between 18 and 25.

I read, and reread, a line in the Times story – “Officials said panicked workers [of a garment factory] were trapped inside the multistory building, which had just one exit” – and something sounds familiar. The calamitous Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 in downtown Manhattan was in a multistory building with one fire escape, two stairwells and lots of locked doors. The loss in the Triangle fire was 146, mostly young women who had immigrated from Italy and Eastern Europe to find a better life.

I keep reading and learn that that the garment factory in Karachi had 1,500 workers and one exit. Additionally, management had installed grills to stop employees from leaving through windows. The bosses didn’t approve of people going home before the end of their shifts.

And I think about the fearless Clara Lemlich and the feckless Mitt Romney.

Lemlich was a garment worker and union organizer who led a strike in New York in 1909 over working conditions and who declared at a meeting of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, “I have listened to all the speakers. I have no further patience for talk, as I am one of those who feels and suffers from the things pictured. I move we go on a general strike.”

For her courage and for the fact that the bosses’ hatred of her was matched by the adoration of thousands of clothing workers, Lemlich was attacked by thugs hired by management. Later she was blacklisted from work in the industry. Despite serious physical injury – she was just 5 feet tall but the lead attacker made sure to bring some help – and the difficulty in finding work, Lemlich never quit. She lived to the age of 97 and, as reported by the great Jim Dwyer of the Times, in her final years helped organized the workers in her nursing home.

And then there is Romney and another nice bowl of Pablum he serves up for anyone who will listen. Recently he uttered the standard right wing line about labor unions: “Over the years, unions have made extraordinarily important contributions to American society.” Which of course is not the whole story.

Labor didn’t make those contributions. Rather, Labor won those contributions, sometimes through calm, peaceful negotiations and at other times through the use of Labor’s only real weapon: the strike. As a result, in some cases, windows were unlocked, doors were allowed to swing open and shut. Workers could get out. Salaries went up. Medical insurance was offered.

“But today, the effects of unionization have changed in ways that need to be recognized,” Romney says at a campaign website. “Too often, unions drive up costs and introduce rigidities that harm competitiveness and frustrate innovation.” And he goes on to make the lame argument that union officials don’t care about anything except staying in business. As if to say that workers are the stooges of their union leaders.

What Mitt Romney, and others like him who had to struggle along on an income of $22 million last year, refuse to accept is that every time a union has won a concession for its members, there were two parties at the bargaining table. This is not complicated unless you don’t wish to understand.

If Romney can cite an example of Labor’s holding a gun to the poor oppressed skull of management, I will retract the following observation: Mitt Romney knows as much about the work life of ordinary people as another famous millionaire, Scrooge McDuck.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com