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The Hamlet Fire - A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives (Paperback)
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The Hamlet Fire - A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives (Paperback)
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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 in search of
cheap labor and almost no oversight. Imperial Food Products was one
of those businesses. The company set up shop in Hamlet in the
1980s. Workers who complained about low pay and hazardous working
conditions at the plant were silenced or fired. But jobs were
scarce in town, so workers kept coming back, and the company
continued to operate with impunity. Then, on the morning of
September 3, 1991, the never-inspected chicken-processing plant a
stone's throw from Hamlet's city hall burst into flames.
Twenty-five people perished that day behind the plant's locked and
bolted doors. It remains one of the deadliest accidents ever in the
history of the modern American food industry. Eighty years after
the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to
have been a thing of the past in the United States. However, as
award-winning historian Bryant Simon shows, the pursuit of cheap
food merged with economic decline in small towns across the South
and the nation to devalue laborers and create perilous working
conditions. The Hamlet fire and its aftermath reveal the social
costs of antiunionism, lax regulations, and ongoing racial
discrimination. Using oral histories, contemporary news coverage,
and state records, Simon has constructed a vivid, potent, and
disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time
that exposes how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came
together in a way that was destined to result in tragedy.
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