Disappearring Industrial Accidents

Amid all the heartbreak of the Sago explosion, all the bungling, all the profiteering, I was reminded of another industrial accident -- a fire at a chicken processing plant, an Imperial Chicken plant in Hamlet, NC. It killed 25 low-wage workers on September 5, 1991.

Funny, er, not at all funny thing -- that outrageous crime turned into a figment of the liberal elite's imagination. It has largely disappeared from the MSM.

My Google searches for relevant phrases like 'imperial chicken 9/5/91' turn up tens of links. TENS! And they're from sources like Maoist International Monthly, from which much of what follows is drawn. Great thing about the Commies; they always give you footnotes.

Searches for 'imperial foods fire' delivered many useful links mostly coming from educators, fire prevention groups and unions. Here are two particularly chilling accounts:

• An emergency responders' website
  
• A public education support site's middle school cirriculum (AP and Time compilation)
  

I guess it's not surprising that the MSM, Wall St., and, especially, the progressive government in NC, don't want to talk about the Good Ole Boys policies that led to the deaths. Or the palty $800k fine that Imperial paid. (Yes, the owner served 4 yrs., but his son, the Operating Manager, walked.)

Anyway, here's a highly edited version of the MIM piece. This is the non-spun, basic reality part of the story. Scares me stupid. But the AP/Time stuff from the education site is the scariest:

FIRE AT IMPERIAL... FOODS

by MA20

...lead para sucks [ed.]...

...[unsustantiated but probably accurate assertions about race- and gender-based hiring, ed,] and the plants choose their locations based on the availability of cheap labor. Imperial Foods opened in the early 1980s, initially employing more than 250 people, making it Hamlet's second largest employer. Hamlet is a town of 6,900 in south-central North Carolina.(2) ...blah blah blah which is one of the reasons that the plant was never inspected...

...more partisan sniping...

No ethnic or national breakdown of the victims has been released by the bourgeois media [read MSM, ed.], to MIM's knowledge. But news reports confirm our suspicions. "Most of the 90 workers caught in the fire were Black, said friends, relatives and onlookers."(2) A relative and friend of many of the fire's victims, Doris Fairley, "said she's convinced that because so many plant workers were Black, improper safety procedures were tolerated."(3) One of Fairley's relatives, Peggy Anderson, who died in the blaze, "stopped by every day after work ... and talked about how the bosses yelled at her and kept up pressure to produce."(3)

The average hourly wage at the plant was $5. "Working conditions are unsanitary, pay is poor and complaints about malfunctioning equipment are sometimes ignored."(2) "The people here care more about the chickens than they do about people," said one Hamlet resident.(1)

Many of the exit doors at the plant were either locked or blocked. One door marked "Fire Exit" was actually a broom closet.(4) Trapped workers, firefighters and passersby had to kick open one door, cut a lock off another, and remove a trash bin and a tractor trailer which were blocking other escape paths. Twenty-two workers
died inside the plant, and three others died after escaping the toxic fumes of the fire-engulfed structure.(3)

Notes:
1. National Public Radio 9/6/91.
2. Winston-Salem Journal 9/4/91, p. 4.
3. Greensboro News and Record 9/5/91, p. 8.
4. NBC News affiliate 9/4/91.

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