DYING FOR FAST FOOD: Labor and Death in America
Imperial Food Products Corp., Sept. 3, 1991
Mark Wood
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • October 10, 1991 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1, No. 1 (pp. 4) | ||
| • August 19, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
On Tuesday, September 3rd, a fire swept through the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. The fire broke out early Tuesday morning when a hydraulic line broke, spilling fluid which spread over the concrete floor and ignited a 26-foot-long grease fryer. Workers attempting to escape through a door marked "Fire Door - Do Not Block" found the door locked and themselves trapped inside the raging inferno. Witnesses said they could hear people inside pounding on the door and screaming "Let me out!"
When the fire was finally extinguished 25 people were dead and more than 45 injured. Some of the victims were found near the exits and others in a meat freezer where they had tried to find shelter from the flames. Of the 25 killed, 18 were single parent African American women, leaving more than 20 orphaned children.
Almost as soon as the flames were extinguished and the dead were laid to rest this tragedy faded from the news. Yet for the people of Hamlet (pop. 6,500) the pain remains as they mourn the dead, attend to the injured, try and find homes for the orphaned children, and begin the long process of healing themselves from the psychological and emotional scars this fire burned into their lives.
Official investigators have yet to determine exactly why the doors leading to safety were locked and who was responsible for locking them. But workers at the plant know why and they know who: they were locked by the company to prevent workers from pilfering the chicken nuggets and marinated chicken breasts they were producing.
Representative William D. Ford, D-Mich., said that there "appears to have been a total lack of enforcement of even the most elementary safety standards," adding that "this is a tragedy that should not have happened" (Syracuse Post-Standard, Sept.6).
Agreed, it should not have happened. But it does happen and will continue to happen without a dramatic transformation of the conditions workers are subjected to in the chicken processing industry, the single largest industry in the South and an industry accounts for one in sixteen industrial jobs in the United States (Camille Colatosti, Against the Current May/June, 1991: p.3).
Changing these conditions begins with knowing what they are; in fact, the Imperial Food Products plant had not been inspected during its entire eleven years of operation. State Labor Commissioner John Brooks said that given the size of his staff it would take 65 years to visit every work place in North Carolina.
North Carolina has the lowest number of work place safety inspectors in a nation in which the number of safety inspectors in all states is far too low to insure safety in the work place. Deregulation and the gutting of federal agencies responsible for monitoring safety in the work place by the Reagan and Bush administrations meant that company owners were less liable for the safety of their workers and less likely to get caught violating what few safety regulations remained. This fact in part explains why the U.S. has one of the highest rates of worker injuries and deaths among all First World countries.
Chicken processing is a $16 billion a year industry, employing upwards of 150,000 workers at slaughterhouses and processing plants across the South. The industry has grown dramatically in the last 30 years as Americans have become more health conscious, eating less beef and more chicken. In 1987, U.S. consumers ate more poultry than beef for the first time ever. The number of broilers slaughtered has increased from 1 billion in 1954 to 5.5 billion in 1989 (Phil Kwik, Labor Notes: May, 1991, p. 14).
During this same period worker productivity increased 176% yet wages are the lowest in any food industry, around $6.00 per hour. It is no wonder then, as Camille Colatosti points out, that "30 % of all jobs in North Carolina, including 42% of the jobs held by women and 44% held by African-Americans pay annual wages below the poverty line for a family of four - $12,674 in 1989" (ATC: p. 3).
The poultry industry is not only one of the lowest paying industries it is also one of the most dangerous. Phil Kwik notes that while "working on fast assembly lines in cold temperatures and performing rapid repetitive hand motions, workers suffer skin diseases, ammonia exposure, infections from toxins in the air, stress, back problems, and a range of cumulative trauma disorders. Every year, almost 28,000 lose their jobs or become disabled due to work- related injuries" (Kwik: p.14). The rate of worker injury is 18.5 per 100 -- more than twice that of textile and tobacco workers, and even higher than construction and mine workers.
Chicken producers are not the only ones whose health is put at risk by the industry. Consumers are also in danger. According to Kwik, because of the "line speed, intestines often rupture and some birds are contaminated with feces carrying bacteria. Healthy and contaminated birds alike are then plunged into the same chiller" (LN: p.14). The birds are contaminated with either salmonella or campylobacter. The USDA reported that 37% of chickens reaching grocery stores were contaminated with salmonella in 1979. While the USDA refuses to release more recent studies, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimate that as many as 2.5 million people are poisoned by salmonella each year. Such poisoning usually only leads to abdominal cramping and diarrhea but for 5,000 people per year it leads to death.
Low wages, low rates of unionization, lack of health and safety standards, and inability to enforce the standards that do exist make North Carolina an attractive state for corporations seeking, as all capitalist corporations are, to cut the costs of production as much as is possible. Cutting costs means, in the main, cutting wages. Not surprisingly North Carolina "led the nation in adding manufacturing jobs over the last three years -- averaging 100,000 new jobs annually" (ATC: p.4).
Colatosti hits the capitalist (nail) on the head when she says that North Carolina is "a corporate paradise -- and a workers' hell" (ibid). In fact, the poultry industry is different from other capitalist industries only by degree. It is exemplary of the contradictory and irrational nature of every form of capitalist production.
Under capitalism economic planning is done by a minority of the population who own the means of production and the goal of their plan is always, ultimately, one and the same: to maximize profits. Further, realization of this goal not only does not have to correspond with the goal of meeting human needs (providing for basic human necessities such as health care, housing, safe working and environmental conditions, and food, etc.), it is, more often than not, realized at the expense of or in contradiction to meeting these needs.
Thus, for example, the desire to cultivate a healthier diet by eating more chicken and less beef is combined with a mode of production which increases the chances of injury, disease and death for both producers and consumers. The desire to raise the level of workers' well-being is contradicted by the owners' interest in lowering wages.
The contradictions between social want and private gain, between the social production and private ownership of what is produced, between the rational goal of raising the conditions of life for all persons and the irrationality of leaving the process of planning the economy to meet this goal in the hands of a small minority, is no better exemplified than it was at the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, North Carolina where the producers of chicken for fast-food restaurants are paid so little they must "steal" from the food they process.
But this is not the worst of it. The worst of it is that many must die (both consumers and producers) and many more (both in the First and Third Worlds) must live lives of misery to maintain a system of production which is totally incapable of solving the social problems human beings face today.
The problems of hunger, housing, health-care, education, ecological destruction, employment, and jobs that give ever person all the chance to develop their individual talents and potentials cannot be solved without a fundamental transformation of human society: a transformation which subordinates economic planning to the collective will and conscious control of the vast majority.
While the owners of Imperial Food Products may be found guilty of safety violations (perhaps even guilty of manslaughter) and pay a heavy fine as a result the capitalist mode of production is likely too get off "scot-free" and it is for this reason that we should not be surprised to find ourselves reading about or suffering through a fire like the one that killed 25 in Hamlet, North Carolina sometime in the near future.
