The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.14 (672 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B01N7YI9AP |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 550 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-07-29 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
And, if that costs us all a bit more, so be it."Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for History"Bryant Simon plunges into the horror of an industrial fire and emerges with a gripping tale of capitalism gone wrong. The Hamlet Fire is an oracle."Ibram X. Sifting through the wreckage, he unearths story after story of the unsustainable cost of cheap: a reckless economy, a cut-rate government, factory food, and disposable lives. The Hamlet Fire is a heartbreaking history of the hollowing out of the American dream."Jefferson Cowie, author of Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class"W
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 battered and fried into golden brown nuggets and tenders. But they kept coming back to work because Hamlet was a place where jobs were scarce. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses searching for cheap labor with little or almost no official oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial Food Products. If a worker complained about the heat or the cold or missed a shift to take care of their children or went to the bathroom too often they were fired. 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 bound for tragedy.. For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. Twenty-five people—many of whom were black women with children, living on their own—perished that day behind 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 pas