'The Hamlet Fire' Explores The Ultimate Price Of Cheap Food

In 1991, disaster struck the small town of Hamlet, North Carolina.

Twenty-five workers at a chicken processing plant, many of whom were women and minorities, were killed as the building burst into flames. The doors of Imperial Food Products had been padlocked shut, leaving employees no means of escape. It's the deadliest industrial plant accident in North Carolina history.

Bryant Simon has written a book called The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives that tells the story. He spoke with WFDD's Eddie Garcia about the long-term price we may be paying for inexpensive food.

Interview Highlights

On the effect of regulation (or the lack thereof):

What was happening was flies were getting in the back door and actually the USDA - which inspected the meat -made a deal with the owners of the plant, Emmett and Brad Roe, to lock the doors to keep the flies out. So it was a kind of deal to protect the meat for consumers, but [it] put workers lives in jeopardy.

The government body that was really in charge of industrial factories and safety was OSHA, and in North Carolina in 1990-91, there were 180,000 workplaces in the state, and OSHA had about 40 factory inspectors at that point. And if they would have worked every day inspecting one factory a day, it would have taken them nearly 70 years to inspect every factory in the state. So the way that the owners dodged oversight was that the state and the government didn't actually fulfill its responsibility to protect workers. And they knew that they could lock doors with impunity.

On the impact of cheap food:

The system of "cheap" relies on all kinds of hidden costs. The food itself was deeply dangerous to people, helping to kind of add to the obesity epidemic, which meant they would lose work. They would suffer a whole set of ailments. This also relied on a kind of relatively cheap government – the lack of regulation, the lack of kind of oversight of the plant... That too would sort of come back to haunt places. The chicken industry is environmentally dangerous, and in the case of Hamlet, it was dangerous to worker's bodies and limbs that day. So "cheap" relies on producing cheap products that the people who don't get paid well have to buy, but it also relies on a kind of hiding of many of the costs of the system.

On regulation now:

Right now we're in another rush for deregulation. The Trump administration took a year to appoint a new head of OSHA, and his confirmation hearings are going on right now. He's an ex-FedEx official, and he was asked if there was an OSHA regulation he ever liked, and he said he couldn't really think of one. And so I think that, you know, the idea that we can deregulate our way back to economic health, something that had been pervasive in the 1980s, and it helped to contribute to the Hamlet disaster, is an idea that is getting a reprise right now under the Trump administration.