TY - GEN T1 - Hamlet fire : a tragic story of cheap food, cheap government, and cheap lives. A1 - Simon, Bryant LA - English PP - Chapel Hill PB - University of North Carolina Press YR - 2020 UL - https://ebooks.jgu.edu.in/Record/ebsco_acadsubs_on1178643139 AB - 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. CN - TH9449.H2 S56 2020 SN - 9781469661384 SN - 1469661381 SN - 9781469661377 SN - 1469661373 SN - 1469660261 SN - 9781469660264 KW - Imperial Food Products. : Plant (Hamlet, N.C.) : Fire, 1991. KW - Poultry plants : Fires and fire prevention : North Carolina : Hamlet. KW - Employers' liability : North Carolina : Hamlet. KW - Industrial safety : Government policy : United States. KW - Sécurité du travail : Politique gouvernementale : États-Unis. KW - HISTORY : United States : State & Local : South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV) KW - Poultry plants : Fires and fire prevention KW - Industrial safety : Government policy KW - Employers' liability KW - North Carolina : Hamlet KW - United States KW - 1991 ER -