Will I love The Hamlet Fire?

Wow, reading this book is tragic and illuminating all at once.

I had never heard about the Hamlet Fire, during which twenty-five people died in a chicken-processing plant in North Carolina in 1991, before reading this book.

But the story of this industrial disaster answered so many questions about how deregulation, reduced labor and environmental protections, racism, and a desire for cheap food came together in this disaster—one that sheds light on the broader problems of the modern American food system. 

Though this book is not a study of movement organizing, it shows just how necessary the task of political and economic empowerment remains, if people are to escape cycles of low wages, dangerous work, persistent racism, and public neglect. This book inspired me, and even more so my students, for the connections it uncovered in a declining North Carolina railroad town: a growing, fiercely competitive, and radically unsafe poultry processing industry; persistent neighborhood segregation and racial disrespect, despite the widespread integration of Blacks and women into workplaces; the exclusion of Blacks and poor whites from local political power; the growth… show more.

The subtitle pretty much says it all: poorly paid workers locked inside an appallingly under-regulated chicken processing plant pay with their lives when the building caught fire so that we can all have cheap chicken nuggets. The fact that this horrific fire in Hamlet, North Carolina, happened fairly recently—in 1991—makes Bryant Simon's well-told story all the more troubling and tragic.