Door kicked open by workers

In September 1991, I was working first shift at the medium-sized prison that had employed me for the previous five years. My co-workers were a mixed group of white folks, African Americans, Native Americans and one officer from Puerto Rico. Most of us had served in the military. Almost none of us had any college. Our spouses worked in various places: the few remaining textile mills, a Converse shoe plant and various chicken and turkey processing facilities, including Imperial Foods, located in Hamlet, NC, about 30 miles away. We'd finished the inmates' breakfast meal and were in the process of getting the prison through its daily cleaning when the switchboard starting putting through calls to the officers wive's who worked at Imperial. Something bad had happened, a fire. Over 100 firefighters had been called in, and the news was grim. There were many, many people on route to the hospital, many missing and the first bodies were being brought out. We had to call in people from second shift to come in early, so the worried husbands could get to the site of the fire.

During the next few days, the survivors began to tell the story of the rapidly spreading fire that was fueled by an ad hoc repair to a hydraulic line that burst right next to a sizzling hot fryer for cooking chicken. Few people knew that although the plant had two previous fires within the last decade, it had never had a state safety inspection. As the workers fled, they encountered locked and chained fire exits, closed at the order of the company's owner, who was worried about people stealing food from his company. Only one group of employees managed to kick open a door. That door, covered in sooty boot prints, is on display today at the museum of American History in Washington, DC. It bears testament to one of the deadliest industrial disasters in state history. Of the 90 people inside Imperial Foods when the fire broke out, 25 died and 54 were injured, many of them suffering lifelong ill effects from smoke and chemical inhalation.

Eventually, the owner of the plant, Emmet Roe was charged with 25 counts of manslaughter, He pled guilty and was sentenced to 20 years, of which he served only four. He was also fined the equivalent of $1.8 million. The plant was permanently closed. Based in part on public outrage, Jim Martin, only the state's second Republican governor in 100 years, nearly doubled the number of industrial inspectors to make workplace inspections more common.

The Hamlet fire is remarkable because it actually resulted in some accountability and change. For years, American companies scoffed at toothless safety laws and the relative impotence of inspectors. Paying fines was easier than paying for safe working conditions. There is an ongoing and concerted effort currently under way to cut through the so-called red tape of government regulations that supposedly make it too difficult to do business. Many of the regulations are ones created for worker safety. The state of Texas repealed a regulation that mandated water breaks for outdoor workers in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave of 100+ degree days. It interfered with worker productivity.

Even before the US elected a 34x convicted felon to be its president, most people were already aware of the two tiered justice system under which this country operates. We saw Bill Cosby released from prison despite evidence of dozens of sexual assaults. We saw Trump pardon crony after crony. Even in the local news in my hometown, there have long been reports of the wives of generals from the nearby Army base, Ft. Liberty (née Bragg) getting traffic tickets fixed, of the sons of prominent businessmen getting caught with drugs and guns at a public school and getting away scott free. The owner of a local car dealership not only bought his way out of charges for sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy, the judge would not allow the records of the court proceedings to be made public in violation of state open records laws. It's an old story and one that gets repeated frequently.

When I see a rich and powerful person get real justice and pay a tangible price for decisions that have had horrible effects on working-class people, I really don't care whether the punishment was extrajudicial or not. The system we have is designed not to punish the powerful, but to keep the poor in line. Eat the rich doesn't have to be an idle threat.

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