The Hamlet Fire by Bryant Simon

Author:Bryant Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620972397
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.