The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives

Amazon.com Price: $11.58 (as of 11/10/2019 14:22 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description


“Captivating and brilliantly conceived. . . [The Hamlet Fire] will provide readers with insights into our current national politics.”
—The Washington Post

A “gifted author” (Chicago Tribune) uses a long forgotten factory fire in small-town North Carolina to show how cut-rate food and labor have develop into 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 develop into a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses looking for cheap labor with little or almost no official oversight. The sort of businesses was once 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 handle their children or went to the toilet too steadily they were fired. But they kept coming back to work because Hamlet was once a place where jobs were scarce. Then, at 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 in the back of 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 once bound for tragedy.


Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » State and Local » The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives

Recent Products