Hamlet Fire

For decades the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1980s, it had become post-industrial backwater, a magnet for businesses looking for cheap labor with little or almost no official oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial Foods, which paid its workers a dollar or so above the minimum wage to stand in pools of freezing water for hours on end, scraping fat off frozen chicken breasts, and fined them if they went to the bathroom too many times during a shift. Then on the morning of September 3, 1991—the day after Labor Day—this factory that had never been inspected caught fire. Twenty-five workers—mostly single mothers, many of whom were black—perished behind locked doors.

Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past. After spending several years talking to the survivors of the fire, award-winning historian Bryant Simon has written a vivid, potent, and riveting social autopsy of this place and of this time that shows how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was bound for tragedy.