Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, December 1909, 15,000 clothing workers in Philadelphia are preparing to strike.

And this is after thousands of garment workers in New York, also staged walkouts and protests

over conditions at factories in that city.

We'll talk about some of those conditions that they were protesting and the specific results of these strikes,

but some bigger context is worth highlighting right now because we are talking about

strikes in 1999 that did result in improved conditions and did lead to more

power for the unions that were organizing these workers but of course all of that was overshadowed in many ways by the incident a couple years later

at the Triangle Shortwaist factory in New York, that horrific fire that killed almost 150 workers,

most of them women, has become one of the defining stories of this era and one that is often seen as spurring a lot of labor activism and reforms.

But there was activism before that moment, before the Triangle for Short Waste

factory and it's a really interesting precursor. So we want to thank our listener Amy who flagged

this for us, gave us the idea to sort of paint this larger context.

So let's talk about the garment activism before shirt waste.

Here as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.

Hello there. Hello Jody. Hey there. Amy perfect

listener email write a sort of overlooked story that taps into a much bigger

theme and we contextualize is something that maybe a lot of people already know ties into other

stories done love it thank you so much Amy keep writing folks if you have ideas but let's go

I guess to the specifics of the activism and the conditions on the ground.

And there is this interesting New York Philadelphia dynamic worth pointing out,

...