Captivating and brilliantly conceived. . . [The Hamlet Fire] will
provide readers with insights into our current national politics.
--The Washington Post
A gifted writer (Chicago Tribune) uses a long forgotten factory fire
in small-town North Carolina to show how cut-rate food and labor have
become the new American norm
For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived
thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial
backwater, a magnet for businesses searching for cheap labor with little
or almost no official oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial
Food Products. The company paid its workers a dollar above the minimum
wage to stand in pools of freezing water for hours on end, scraping gobs
of fat off frozen chicken breasts before they got dipped in batter and
fried into golden brown nuggets and tenders. If a worker complained
about the heat or the cold or missed a shift to take care of their
children or went to the bathroom too often they were fired. But they
kept coming back to work because Hamlet was a place where jobs were
scarce. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991, the day after Labor
Day, this factory that had never been inspected burst into flame.
Twenty-five people--many of whom were black women with children, living
on their own--perished that day behind the plant's locked and bolted
doors.
Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters
were supposed to have been a thing of the past. After spending several
years talking to local residents, state officials, and survivors of the
fire, award-winning historian Bryant Simon has written a vivid, potent,
and disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time
that shows how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came
together in a way that was bound for tragedy.
