The Hamlet Fire

by Bryant Simon

  Workers in meatpacking and food processing faced added challenges. Through much of the 1970s and 1980s, larger and larger companies were taking over more and more of the plants where cows and chickens were disassembled and transformed into burgers and tenders. Like Emmett Roe did when he moved from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, these firms fought back against unions and government regulations by shifting their operations farther from the urban cores into small towns and rural ghettos filled with economically vulnerable and desperate laborers. They didn’t worry about turnover rates, because the jobs were easy to learn and there always seemed to be another person waiting to take a turn on the line. Operating under these conditions, employers had few incentives to raise wages.42

  The simultaneous fall in wages and drop in the price of further-processed foods wasn’t just about efficiencies, subsidies, and relentless economies. It was about the cheapening, once more, of the American social contract. In 1914, Henry Ford had set a new wage standard for the country. Looking to reduce turnover rates, dull the appeal of radicalism, and swell the market of buyers for his mass-produced Model Ts, Ford famously paid his workers an astounding five dollars a day, doubling the going rate. Other companies followed Ford’s lead. In tight labor markets, they had no choice if they wanted to hire workers. With the advent of the New Deal and the industrial mobilization for World War II, Fordism—and the idea of seeing laborers not solely as a cost to employers but also as vital consumers critical to growing aggregate demand and sustaining the overall health of the nation’s economy—became central to corporate and government policy.43

  The idea of more as a social good got carried into the postwar era and made it, in the words of the historian Jefferson Cowie, “an extraordinarily good time to be a worker.” For the very first time in United States history, the nation’s largest businesses and the federal government recognized unions and collective bargaining as legitimate aspects of American life. But even more important, they saw working-class prosperity as a key indicator of economic health. As a result, Cowie writes in The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, “more income, more equality, more optimism, more leisure, more consumer goods, more travel, more entertainment, more expansive homes, and more education were all available to regular people than at any other time in world history.”44

  Beginning in the 1970s, this notion of more got turned on its head. The link between wages and consumption remained intact, but it began to operate in a different direction. The Ford worker, the standard bearer of American labor—buying a new car every other year and packing the family up for an annual vacation to Cedar Park or Disneyland or Yellowstone—was replaced after 1975 by an Imperial worker counting the loose change and crumpled dollar bills in her pocket as she headed into the supermarket to get a low-cost package of chicken nuggets or a bag of tenders to feed her family for dinner.

  Cheap food stood at the heart of the inversion of Fordism. As family incomes shrunk, the regular people that Cowie talked about became dependent on paying less. Inexpensive, industrially produced chicken products and mass-manufactured fries meant they could still put plenty of food on the table. Their families wouldn’t go hungry. They could even afford cake, packets of chocolate chip cookies, and MoonPies full of HFCS that cost a quarter in 1991 in the Lance vending machines in the Imperial breakroom.

  As poultry capitalism and the larger “chickenization”—to borrow journalist Christopher Leonard’s phrase—of the food industry pushed down the incomes of farmers and workers, they created a ballooning group of consumers who had no choice but to buy the cheap necessities they made and sold.45 The economy of falling paychecks channeled people toward a dangerous eating routine of chicken tenders and hot dogs, frozen fries and boxes of macaroni and cheese, toward a diet marked by convenience and easy preparation and filled with fat and salt, a diet marked by the absence of whole grains and costly fruits and vegetables. This did, in fact, turn out to be a matter of choice, a matter of rational economic choice.

  In the years before the Imperial fire, the prices of healthy and unhealthy foods moved in sharply opposite directions. “If you look at the relative price of fruits and vegetables,” the writer, academic, and food activist Marion Nestle pointed out, “it has gone up by 40 percent since the 1980s, when the obesity epidemic first began. In contrast, the relative price of processed foods has gone down by about 40 percent. So if you only have a limited amount of money, you are going to spend it on the cheapest calories you can get.”46

  Imperial worker Annette Zimmerman knew just what Nestle was talking about. Every once in a while, she explained, she would stop by a small grocery in Hamlet run by Mr. Turner because he carried fresh produce and “gave credit.” Usually she went for what was cheap. And fruit, she said, “back then cost way more than processed food.” With money short, she got chips instead of grapes and fish sticks instead of fresh fish. The kids ate sugary cereal for breakfast and popped something in the microwave for dinner a few nights a week when her arms and wrists hurt too much to cook.47

  When they qualified for them, Annette Zimmerman and many of her colleagues relied on food stamps to help them feed their families. Yet, in some ways, the Great Society program unintentionally added to the problem of too much of the wrong kinds of calories. Working families received their food stamp allocation once a month, so they tended to buy in bulk, and that meant purchasing long-lasting, often salty, HFCS-infused further-processed foods.48

  A steady diet of further-processed foods didn’t make people sick or overweight, but it did make it harder for them to get and stay healthy. According to the documentary film A Place at the Table, three dollars’ worth of fruit adds up to 307 calories. That same three dollars can buy as many as 3,767 calories of processed foods. Over time, the utterly rational choice of purchasing more calories for less money left an imprint on people’s bodies, especially bodies without time for exercise, access to parks or jogging trails, or jobs an easy walk down a well-maintained sidewalk from their homes. The comparative cost of cheap calories, combined with the nearly addictive qualities of the main ingredients of cheap food—fat, sugar, and salt—explains better than any other factor or set of factors the jump in weight gain in the 1980s in the United States. The cycle started with thinning pay envelopes and the limited choices that this economic fact left for low-paid workers when they thought about their meals and snacks.49

  Because the dangers in the American diet were linked to income, they were, like so much of life in the United States since the downfall of the New Deal and Fordist pay standards, not evenly distributed. That made low-paid Imperial workers doubly vulnerable at the supermarket and at work. Most, of course, took the highest-paying jobs available to them in Hamlet, and for many that meant working at Imperial and still not having much money to spend on basic necessities. Foremost, a tight budget meant limited food options. According to researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), “There is a strong relationship between economic status and obesity, especially among women.” Poor women, the numbers show, are six times more likely to be obese than are women from middle- and upper-middle-class homes. Children whose parents rely on welfare and low-wage work to get by are particularly vulnerable to both the short-term and the long-term health risks associated with dangerous diets and weight gain.50

  In post-1970s America, an alarming paradox of plenty came into play. The poorer you were, the more likely you were to suffer from the ill effects of weight gain. That’s because dangerous foods fit the tightest time and money budgets. The most vulnerable chose cheap food because they had to. The person who crunched these numbers the hardest was the head of the household, often in poor families a single mom without much education. She stood at the bottom of the nation’s wage pyramid. Low pay mixed with conditions at America’s supermarkets and restaurants pushed these women and their children into places of food insecurity. It also left them vulnerable to new forms of discrimination. Studies have shown that people seen as
heavy are often passed over for better jobs and housing opportunities, leaving them stuck in a cycle of poverty and impoverished food choices.51

  Despite working in a dangerous environment and living in a dangerous foodscape, Imperial workers rarely made enough to afford their own health care coverage. The costs and consequences of poultry capitalism got passed on to local teachers tasked with handling inattentive students, to parents dealings with their children’s asthma and joint problems, to health care workers with nothing left in their budgets trying to help their clients cope with weight gain, to everyone, it seems, except for the companies behind the system of cheap. Imperial and Cagle’s didn’t pay for the outcomes of their choices. They didn’t clean up the environmental messes caused by the pools of urine and piles of feces left standing on the land and leaking into water systems, messes produced by animal factories contracted to them. They didn’t compensate homeowners who watched the values of their properties plummet when one of their animal factories opened down the road and released noxious fumes into the country air. Imperial workers, too, paid with their broken bodies. They didn’t get much in the way of compensation from the company when they pulled a muscle in their backs or tweaked their wrists. When line ladies complained, foremen and supervisors told them that they had a mild form of arthritis or some other injury caused by gardening or sewing away from the job, not an ailment associated with repetitive motions at work. In the end, it didn’t cost the company one extra penny when workers quit because they couldn’t move their hands and went on public assistance. When that happened, it was the taxpayers (and to a certain extent, workers themselves) who absorbed the costs of cheap further-processed chicken.

  Neither Imperial nor Cagle’s kicked in to help offset the costs of obesity either. No fast food company in the 1990s paid a premium or social tax for making poorly labeled food-like substances, things like chicken tenders and fried apple pies, that made people susceptible to weight gain. The government, in turn, underwrote the costs for companies like Imperial, Cagle’s, and McDonald’s with road building, low-interest loans to growers to expand their animal factories, agricultural research, and corn and soy subsidies. With its tuition support and grants to poultry science programs, it helped to pay for product development for big chicken companies and high-energy feeds for chicken consolidators. With more government aid, food companies like Monsanto and Kraft, Imperial and Cagle’s, turned the cheap goods around them into dangerous calories. Yet they weren’t taxed or penalized for doing this. In fact, the only regulations anyone came up with, and these were proposed years after the fire, were to tax Happy Meals and bottled soda. However, many of the same people who accepted seat-belt mandates and helmet laws dismissed these measures as the unnecessary overreaching of an obtrusive nanny state. All the while, the United States government refused to underwrite the distribution of healthier, locally made foods. This absence of support, in turn, made these foods seem to cost more in the supermarket than corn-based products and other mass-produced, highly processed food-like goods that benefited from subsidies and the blind eyes turned toward both the environment and worker safety.

  At the same time, the most vulnerable—those on public assistance, the working poor, and especially single moms with kids—didn’t have adequate health care coverage. They put off seeing a doctor or used the emergency room for well-care and advice about a cold or allergies or asthma or diabetes. Of course, this was, in the long run, the most expensive way to take care of themselves and their children. But what choice did they have? Adding insult to injury, right there in the hospital, even at a place like the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, an institution that documented the dangerous spread of weight gain and its class-based implications on its web page, there was, for years, a McDonald’s selling all kinds of risk behind the welcoming face of Ronald McDonald.52

  Imperial workers and their bodies were locked into this system of false choices. They got paid little and had few realistic options for supporting themselves and their families. That, in turn, limited their food choices and essentially doomed them to consume the generic foods they made at work, or foods just like them in terms of price and empty calories. Eating tenders, fries, and soda for lunch and dinner put them at risk and made them and their bodies appear costly to congressmen and commentators newly alarmed, beginning in the 1980s, over the high costs of the so-called obesity epidemic. The madness of the system made them and their bodies look like a problem, a momentous financial burden that threatened the republic and its more disciplined citizens. It made them seem like they had made an endless series of bad choices. But really, they had been rational consumers. Choice, in the sense of what to eat, was a luxury that they didn’t really have. They ate cheap foods because they had to on the wages they made, even if the consequences proved dangerous and costly. No real alternative existed, not with the government operating most often in the interests of business and trying to drum up jobs and tax revenues by underwriting the entire system of cheap and dangerous food.53

  “It’s the reverse of industrial development,” Bob Hall of the Institute of Southern Studies commented years later when thinking about the fire at Imperial. In the 1980s, places like Hamlet, with its boarded-up businesses along Main Street, cheered when a company like Imperial came to town. They called men like Emmett Roe job creators. But the jobs they offered and products they sold took healthy people and turned them into physical wrecks. Scores of sturdy women and men raised on peach farms and cotton patches building fences and picking crops in the hot sun broke down after a year or two on the chicken-processing line. Many were bloated and bruised. Some ended up disabled and unemployed at a cost to everyone, it seemed, except for the companies that were supposed to be doing the industrial development. Busy moms fed the cheap foods they made at work to their kids for dinner and got them hooked on the taste and short-term high of heavy doses of fat, sugar, and salt. And they fed them the same things the next day and the day after that, until their bodies and their families’ bodies appeared, just by looking at them, as part of the problem.54

  6

  DEREGULATION

  Reporters flocked to Hamlet after the fire. Journalists tracked down survivors on the street and knocked on the doors of grieving spouses, aunts, uncles, and friends. They camped outside of the fire station just off Main Street waiting to ask Chief David Fuller about sprinklers, locked doors, and the absence of lighted exits with panic bars in the plant. Journalists from all over the state and country crowded into City Hall news conferences, peppering Mayor Abbie Covington with questions about the factory, the Roes, and the town. Photographers snapped pictures of orphaned children riding their bikes back and forth in front of the crumbled plant. Television crews interviewed grief-stricken parents and snuck into church memorial services. They filmed workers as they picked up their last paychecks and spouses as they gathered up the belongings left behind by wives and husbands who perished in the fire.

  Back in the newsrooms in Raleigh and Charlotte, Baltimore and New York, journalists dug into Emmett Roe’s past and learned about the company’s shaky finances and mounting debts. They researched the explosive growth of southern poultry capitalism, and they looked closely at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in North Carolina. They quickly discovered that even though federally run branches of the agency had scrutinized Roe’s Pennsylvania operations, and even though the Imperial plant had caught fire three times between 1980 and 1987, no safety inspector had ever stepped foot inside the factory. But that wasn’t the biggest surprise. With a bit more digging, the journalists found out that North Carolina, and its state-operated OSHA program, had the lowest ratio of factory inspectors to workplaces in the entire county. With the number of safety officials it had on the job in 1991, each of the state’s 180,000 factories, eateries, and mills could expect a random inspection of its facilities once every seventy-five years.1

  Businesspeople knew all about North Carolina’s limited enforcement of workplace safety. It had
been no secret when Emmett Roe moved to the state in the 1980s, and it was no secret in the summer of 1991. Government officials knew as well. Six months before the fire, the federal Department of Labor criticized North Carolina’s worker safety program, saying that the state jeopardized the health and well-being of tens of thousands of working people by not inspecting enough workplaces or unearthing enough serious violations in its factories and plants. The report sat on the desks of bureaucrats in Washington and Raleigh, and nothing was done about its troubling observations.2

  “Now,” NBC reporter Robert Hager gravely pronounced on the network’s nightly newscast on September 4, 1991, “it’s too late.”3

  Hager expected more from OSHA and more from the government. He expected it to protect Hamlet workers, but by 1991, the ethos of cheap, the push to reverse Fordism, and the faith in business as the answer to the nation’s economic woes had worn thin the law’s protective shield and most people’s belief that it could help them.

  Richard Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration Act (OSHA) into law in 1970 over stern objections from the Chamber of Commerce and other business concerns. For decades before, American courts generally did not hold employers accountable for the safety of their workers. The burden fell, instead, on the workers themselves. Legal precedents established that once a person accepted a job, she or he accepted the stated, and often unstated, risks of the position. OSHA, however, promised an expansion of the social contract. “So far as possible,” the law read, “every working man and woman in the nation [shall have] safe and healthful working conditions . . . free from recognized hazards that are causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm.” To back up the pledge, the law granted the United States secretary of labor broad powers to conduct unannounced inspections of private workplaces with more than eleven employees, formulate necessary regulations to ensure safety, require employers to keep detailed on-site logs of work-related injuries and illnesses, and issue citations and impose and publicize civil penalties for serious violations.4