Before corporate social responsibility was a popular concept, Patagonia declared its commitment to better outcomes for their workers, and the planet. They soon discovered that commitment would include major pitfalls, but it seems the more Patagonia doubles down on its values, the better it performs. In this episode, we hear from Craig Wilson, former lead strategist for consumer marketing at Patagonia; Bethany Patten, Senior Associate Director for MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and Maya Spaull, Vice President of apparel and home goods at Fair Trade USA. We also speak with Andrew Kenney, a journalist who got insider access to see how Patagonia is redefining its business processes. Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast.
It began with a small fire in a bin full of cotton rags.
Maybe someone had dropped a lit cigarette by mistake.
A manager ran to the fire hose to try to put it out, but the hose was rotted and the valve so rusted it wouldn't turn.
The fire quickly spread.
Within minutes, panic spread through the hundreds of seamstresses in the building, mostly young women.
They rushed to the elevators, but three.
Out of four didn't work.
The fourth only held twelve people at a time.
They rushed to the stairs, but the door at the bottom of the stairwell was locked from the outside.
They rushed to the fire escape, which wasn't nearly big enough.
It collapsed under their weight.
In desperation, women flung themselves down the elevator shaft or from the building's windows.
18 minutes later, it was over 146 workers had died.
Until September 11, 2001, it was the deadliest workplace disaster in New York history.
That's right.
That scene didn't play out recently.
In a developing country was the triangle shirtwaist factory fire, which happened in Manhattan on March 25, 1911.
It was followed by such an outcry of protest, it laid the groundwork for state and national workplace safety codes.
And because of those changes, nothing like the triangle factory fire happened again in the United States.
But in other parts of the world, disasters like this keep happening.