The Hamlet Fire

A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives

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Bryant Simon: The Hamlet Fire (EBook, 2020, University of North Carolina Press)

eBook, 302 pages

English language

Published July 23, 2020 by University of North Carolina Press.

ISBN:
978-1-4696-6137-7
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5 stars (1 review)

"Just over twenty-five years ago, on the day after Labor Day, a chicken processing factory in Hamlet, North Carolina, burst into flames. The blaze immediately created a wall of heat and split the factory in half. Twenty-five people--eighteen of whom were women, twelve of whom were black--perished behind the plant's bolted doors. In previous decades, Hamlet had thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it was a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses searching for cheap labor and little oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial Food Products, which paid its workers a dollar above the nation's paltry minimum wage--then $4.25 an hour--to scrape gobs of fat off frozen chicken breasts before they were battered and fried into golden-brown tenders. If a worker complained about the pace of the line or missed a shift to take care of children or went to the bathroom too often they were …

2 editions

wide-swept labor history

5 stars

Incredible labor history, focused intently on a single tragic factory fire in a small North Carolina town, but with chapters diving deep into the political, economic, and sociological history of why neoliberal American industry sought out and created internally colonized places of ever cheapened government, food, health, and lives. He even fit all that in the subtitle, bravo, highly recommended.