The Hamlet Fire
Page 22
At the start of each legislative session in what would become an annual ritual of futility, Brooks called on the governor and leading members of the General Assembly. He asked for more money for the Department of Labor so it could hire additional administrators, statisticians, and inspectors. He wanted more experts in the Raleigh office and more staff in the field. At one point, he pushed for a workplace safety commissioner in each of the state’s one hundred counties. He was, as usual, rebuffed. The neglect was starting to take its toll—not so much on Brooks as on the state’s workers.51
In the decade leading up to the Hamlet fire, the state’s inspectorate was on the decline and enforcement was waning. In 1980, North Carolina had 1.9 million workers and forty-seven safety and health inspectors. Ten years later, after adding a record-setting 700,000 new jobs, many of them in dangerous industries like meat packing and small-scale manufacturing, North Carolina had only forty-two inspectors, or just 34 percent of the minimum required by the Department of Labor’s relatively lax national standards—not that any federal officials moved to punish the state for its deficient numbers. But even that number didn’t tell the whole story. Only twenty-seven or twenty-eight of the state’s inspectors were fully qualified to conduct workplace safety inspections. (The others performed health inspections.) That gave the state the worst ratio of inspectors to industrial sites in the entire nation. But it wasn’t like North Carolina was opposed in principle to hiring people to oversee various aspects of daily life. In 1991, the state employed 400 agricultural agents to check on its declining farm sector and another 203 wildlife officers to enforce hunting and fishing laws. The point was that the state refused to make a similar investment in workplace safety, no matter how many times Brooks or the head of the state AFL-CIO asked.52
With a dwindling OSHA inspectorate, North Carolina workers faced riskier conditions. Between 1983 and 1985, according to data from the North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Project, laborers in the state were “getting hurt more often” and the “injuries [were] more disabling.” During this small window of time, North Carolina experienced a 9 percent increase in the total rate of work-related injuries and illnesses, a 20 percent increase in the rate of lost workdays, and a 20 percent increase in the number of workers injured on the job. Between 1985 and 1986, one out of every fourteen private-sector workers in North Carolina suffered, at some point, from a job-related injury or illness.53 While injuries rose, surprise inspections, the most effective way to keep employers on their toes and adhering to the law, dropped. In 1989, unannounced factory visits, as opposed to visits scheduled in advance, comprised 69 percent of the total inspections in North Carolina. A year later, that number fell to 54 percent, compared to a national average of 67 percent. A year after that, unannounced inspections dropped to one-third of all inspections in North Carolina.54
Even when it did agree to look into a case, the North Carolina Department of Labor acted so slowly, it seemed to be always dragging its feet. By the time of the fire, the agency had a backlog of sixty-one “serious” complaints, all of them waiting for an investigation. Some of the cases dated back as far as 1984. “A large backlog,” noted a federal OSHA investigator in the summer of 1991, “is an indication that resources aren’t being used efficiently or that more resources are needed.” Despite the troubling signs, Washington didn’t force North Carolina to spend more to protect its burgeoning workforce.55
Commissioner John Brooks tried to force the state’s hand. Just months before the fire, he requested $17.5 million from the General Assembly to hire 292 new staffers, including an additional 108 inspectors. The increase would have brought the state in line with federal standards. Governor James Martin, the state’s Republican chief executive, dedicated to cutting taxes and continuing to attract new businesses to the state, countered with a recommendation to spend $500,000 to hire thirteen new inspectors. Struggling to deal with a budget shortfall, the legislature, with bipartisan support, rejected both proposals and cut five of the Department of Labor’s positions while, again, taking almost nothing away from allocations for the highway department or the agency in charge of industrial recruitment.56
In the press and in the halls of the General Assembly, Brooks fumed about the cuts. None of his protests, however, won him any new allies. Maybe because of his brusque manner or because his plans could hurt the state’s competitive advantage in luring new firms, Brooks was never a favorite with lawmakers, not even those from his own party. But even as he asked for more funding, he never spent all the monies he had, something he had a difficult time explaining after the fire. In the fourteen years before the Hamlet tragedy, Brooks returned $7 million in unspent funds to federal and state authorities. In 1991, the Department of Labor had five open and unfilled inspector positions, yet it still gave $453,000 in unused money back to Washington.57 That money could have paid for additional factory visits or moved along the state’s backlog of investigations, including a six-month inquiry into carpal tunnel syndrome at a Perdue poultry plant that kept two department agents busy full-time without yielding a decisive ruling one way or the other. Brooks claimed that the state government’s low pay scales, another element of cheap, made it tough for him to hire and retain well-trained and qualified inspectors. Critics accused Brooks of micromanaging the agency and dithering when it came to making choices. “There is no one more brilliant in the state,” a friend told a reporter. “But sometimes John will sit on his ass until the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria get back before he’ll make a decision.”58
Maybe if Brooks had acted faster, the agency he ran could have used some of the money it had to purchase new informational posters. The state’s OSHA law required employers to hang signs in their plants with the number to call to report safety violations. Three-quarters of the signs in North Carolina in 1991, however, listed a phone number that had been disconnected. When a caller dialed it, she didn’t even get a forwarding number.59
Imperial workers couldn’t even see the wrong number. According to several reports, the plant’s time clocks blocked the OSHA sign that someone had once hung up on the wall.60
After the fire, Brooks took a lot of heat for his managerial style, but the problems were bigger than him. The system in North Carolina and around the country had its limits, and bending them to accommodate the interests of labor didn’t seem like one of the ways that they could go. “Even good, well-intentioned labor laws are no protection,” asserted Albert Shanker, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, in an essay in the New Republic in 1992, if the government, at both the state and federal levels, won’t impose the measures and won’t issue fines that cost employers more than the price of a few boxes of frozen chicken tenders. Effective workplace laws can’t be self-enforced if employees have no voice. How many workers, desperate to hold on to a job at an out-of-the way plant in a community with a labor surplus, were willing to pick up a phone to call in a safety violation, especially when the first number they dialed was disconnected? How many knew that the OSHA law even existed when they had never seen an OSHA inspector? The inspectors they did see, like the USDA men, hung out in the office and seemed, in the words of one worker, to be “chummy” with management and they also seemed to be much more interested in the meat and in shooing away flies than workplace safety issues.61
When an Imperial worker did approach a USDA official sometime around 1990 to tell him about safety concerns, the meat inspector answered, “I had no jurisdiction over that.”62 Without the government on the ground or a union backing them up, how many workers had the gumption to challenge their employers? Without the threat of a challenge, what held worker safety laws in place? Why would employers, especially financially strapped employers in competitive industries with razor-thin profit margins, abide by the laws and update and maintain their plants when they knew they couldn’t get caught? Who wouldn’t cut a few corners in the face of mounting economic pressures? Why would employers buck the trend and volunteer to sacrifice profits when t
he public debate pointed to regulations as the cause of economic stagnation? Who would spend the money needed on safety when politicians sang the praises of business and derided government action?63
“An employer doesn’t have to be an Einstein,” Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union said in 1990, “to figure out you probably aren’t going to get inspected.” Without “dead bodies,” Jim Moran, a Philadelphia health and safety expert grimly joked a few years before the fire, the agency wouldn’t inspect a factory. The Reagan administration’s systematic cuts to OSHA did more than just eliminate the chance of a knock at the factory door; they also made it easier for employers to run their plants to meet the imperatives of cheap and deliver low-cost goods to consumers, including their own workers.64 Emmett and Brad Roe seemed to make a similar economic and social assessment. At Imperial, managers jacked up line speeds, skimped on preventive maintenance, and put off replacing outdated equipment.65 Why pay for new machines or new protections or follow every safety rule or suggestion in a manual when labor was cheap and easily replaced? Why abide by the rules when no one was going to enforce them, not OSHA inspectors or unions or line workers? If a company like Imperial wanted to follow the letter of the law on worker safety, it essentially handicapped itself. As David Bell, who calculated economic impacts for OSHA, explained, “When a competitor can cut costs by cutting corners on safety, (other) company officials don’t like being placed at a competitive disadvantage.” Often it wasn’t simply a matter of liking it or not; it was a matter of staying in business, not getting undercut by a competitor, and making enough money to pay off outstanding bank notes.66
Workers felt a similar sense of risk, and, as it was with businesspeople, this sense of peril shaped their attitudes toward government. According to one estimate, the economic restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s erased 15 million jobs. Fearing that enforcing OSHA standards would cause their creaky, outdated, and often isolated factories to close, laborers begged their union representatives and co-workers to back off and look the other way in the face of asbestos in the air, gas smells, leaky connections, and much-needed plant repairs. “For many today,” observed the New York Times’ influential labor correspondent William Serrin in the 1980s, “job safety is far less important than simply work—any work.”67
An activist, a reformer, and later an academic, Mark Schultz worked in the 1980s for the Wisconsin Occupational Safety and Health Project, a private, nonprofit organization of workers, union locals, and health and legal professionals. In this job, he lobbied Badger State legislators to enact more stringent safety measures, counseled union members on how to spot violations, and led workplace seminars on how to avoid injury. In 1990, he took a similar position with the Durham-based and newly established North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Project.
Schultz quickly learned that he wasn’t in Wisconsin anymore. For starters, he didn’t develop extensive union contacts in North Carolina. The political climate was different as well. He couldn’t find more than a handful of General Assembly members willing to listen to his push for more inspectors and increased investment in factory safety. When he tried to get something done about the alarming rise in cases of carpal tunnel syndrome in the state’s slaughterhouses and poultry-processing plants, lawmakers nodded their heads and then urged caution. “We need to maintain a good business climate,” they repeatedly counseled Schultz as they brushed aside his suggestions.
North Carolina workers sensed, Schultz believed, the state’s indifference to their safety. They knew that their jobs came with risks and that the line speeds in many plants led to repetitive motion injuries and threatened their limbs and fingers. They knew that some factory owners thought about safety second and churning out the product first. But they also knew the cost of breaking the silence that businesspeople like Emmett Roe coveted. As bad as conditions were at Imperial Food Products or at a poultry slaughterhouse in Siler City or at a hog factory in Smithfield, the line workers at these places at least had a job and drew a weekly paycheck. Some sensed the dynamics of a competitive industry without speaking the language of boardrooms and trading floors. If they complained too much, if their co-workers raised their voices too loudly, there was always the chance that the factories would disappear and never come back. That’s what happened to the railroads in Hamlet and to Clark Equipment in Rockingham, wasn’t it? They closed down—in the case of Clark, after a close union vote—and took their jobs with them.68
Even if a line worker at Imperial did decide to say something about the conditions at the plant, she probably didn’t know where to turn. Several times during the 1980s, OSHA inspectors reached the doorstep of the Bridges Street factory but never made it inside. For a number of years after they sold the factory, Mello-Buttercup officials leased back a small section of the plant from Emmett Roe. They employed three people there to store and distribute ice cream throughout Richmond County and the surrounding areas. For some reason, state inspectors kept returning to this tiny corporate footprint. In October 1981, an OSHA official found three minor violations there and issued no fines. He returned in May 1984 and found three more non-serious problems and again issued no fines. Five months later, as Imperial cranked out batches of fried chicken parts, he conducted another follow-up investigation to make sure that Mello-Buttercup had addressed his agency’s safety concerns. Three times, then, an OSHA inspector was only a wall away from the Imperial shop floor, but he might as well have been in another county. Even if he had smelled gas or rotten chicken, he couldn’t just knock on the door. By law, OSHA officials weren’t allowed to decide on their own to drop by a plant that hadn’t been selected for inspection by the Department of Labor in Raleigh. Court decisions held that regulators could only launch a safety visit in response to a complaint or random selection.69
When an Imperial employee in Hamlet wrote to OSHA in October 1987 about maggots in the breakroom and filth and lice in the women’s bathroom, Max Avery, an OSHA review officer, wrote the company a letter and asked for a response. The factory’s general manager, James Hair, answered each of the charges with a curt dismissal:
“Description of Alleged Violations,” he wrote, continuing:
Item #1: Body lice in women’s bathroom. These were not body lice, but someone had combed hair in sink, leaving head lice. We immediately called in the pest control company and had them go through the women’s bathroom even though we knew it was head lice.
Item #2: Maggots have been seen in the canteen (eating area.) This could not have been because we clean the area three times a day and it is scrubbed down every night completely.
Item #3: Women’s bathroom is very dirty. This could not possibly be. We have someone pick up after the morning break, lunch break, and afternoon break. The facilities are also scrubbed and sanitized every night.
No one from OSHA visited the plant to follow up, and no one responded to Hair. His word was enough to close the case.70
In June 1991, just months before the fire, several South Hamlet residents complained to the city council that tractor-trailers dropping off frozen chicken breasts and picking up tenders blocked Bridges Street, sometimes for hours at a time. One council member declared this a safety issue that warranted OSHA’s attention. Another suggested writing a letter to the Roes. That’s where the matter ended, it seems.71
Imperial worker Conester Williams wanted someone to inspect the plant. Years later, she remembered calling up the local employment bureau—the agency that often acted as Imperial’s labor recruiter in Hamlet and Rockingham—to talk to someone about the unsafe and dangerous conditions at the factory and to urge them to stop sending out-of-work women and men, as they had for years, over to Bridges Street until something was done. She never heard back from anyone at the office, and the flow of workers just kept coming.72
One company official said he had a copy of OSHA standards in his office desk. “I couldn’t understand a whole lot of it,” he admitted to investigators after the
fire. Another remembered glancing at the thick book of rules and regulations once. “’Course,” he commented, “you got to have a B.A. degree to read the darn thing.” After that, the rules stayed in his desk.73
The bigger problem was that the ethos of cheap eroded Imperial workers’ faith in the government. It certainly didn’t seem to be functioning in their interests. This was a serious, and perhaps purposeful, side effect of the business-first politics that had flipped the New Deal and Fordism on their heads. Deregulation tended to erode support for state action among those who needed it most. Imperial workers almost never spotted a local firefighter or city official in the plant, and this came on top of years of experience for African Americans away from the job with Jim Crow policing and uneven schooling and government services in their parts of town. Most days, though, employees did see the USDA men in the factory. They saw them check the floors and freezers, search for mice droppings, and shoo away flies. And, of course, they saw them inspect the meat. They also watched as chicken breasts spotted with mold and fungus got dipped into batter and packed into boxes. Just about every day, USDA officials walked across Imperial’s slippery floors as gas fumes wafted through the plant. These officials saw the mechanics struggling with the fryer and the conveyor belts. But the USDA inspectors never said anything. Workers saw that USDA men walked in and out of the plant the same as always, even after the doors near the dumpster were locked, one of them from the outside. And they saw the USDA men in the office, sipping Cokes and chatting with Brad Roe as if they might be friends.74