When I was growing up, the Triangle Shirt Waist fire was still vivid in people's memories. I often heard my mother, a garment worker and an ardent trade unionist, talk about how 150 workers, most of them young women, were killed in that fire. Many of them died struggling to escape through exit doors that were locked from the outside because the factory owners were afraid of workers' stealing the garments. Others were killed as they jumped from windows to get away from the flames. That fire was 80 years ago, and most people thought nothing like it could ever happen again. It was part of a bygone era before there were unions
and health and safety laws to protect workers and inspectors to enforce the laws. But we were wrong -- as we found out with the Imperial Food Products fire in Hamlet, N.C.
Last September 3, a fire broke out near the deep-fat fryer in Imperial's chicken-processing plant and spread quickly through the one-story building. The plant had no windows and no sprinkler or fire alarm system. And workers who got to the unmarked fire exits found some of them locked from the outside. Imperial's management was using the same "loss control" technique as the bosses at Triangle Shirt Waist -- and with the same results. Twenty-five of the 90-odd employees working at the time were killed, suffocated by the black smoke that filled the plant, and 55 more were injured.
What about the workplace health and safety laws that should have protected these workers? What about the inspectors? When states have budget crises and cut back on their services, few people are concerned if some state employees get laid off and some positions go unfilled. People tend to think of these employees as bureaucrats who are not doing anything much. They don't think that many of them provide crucial services -- like inspecting workplaces to see if they are safe.
That was part of the problem in North Carolina. The state Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) had only 22 safety inspectors and 13 health inspectors -- reduced from the 77 required by law. Imperial' s chicken-processing plant should have been well up on their list anyway: It was one of 3,213 (out of 180,000) North Carolina workplaces in the "high hazard" category, and there had already been a fire there in 1984. But given the level of staffing and the work schedule at North Carolina OSHA, it would have taken the agency 30 years to check out all the "high hazard" workplaces. No one ever got around to inspecting the plant in Hamlet.
As for the union, North Carolina is a state whose right-to-work laws discourage unionization, so the workers at Imperial didn't have one. Of course, they could have complained anyway. But ask yourself how likely that was. The majority of lmperial's workers were poor women -- and many were single mothers -- who worked at or slightly above the minimum wage. Most of them probably had no idea that Imperial was breaking the law and that there was a government agency to which they could complain. But even if they had known, there are few jobs in Hamlet, and unemployment there is high. Employees knew the company would have no trouble replacing them if they made trouble. And how many would take a chance of losing the only job they were likely to get?
The other day, the North Carolina Department of Labor hit Imperial Food Products with over $800,000 in civil fines, citing 54 "willful" safety violations, 23 "serious" violations, and 6 "other-than-serious" violations in the Hamlet plant. You can call this good news because it is the biggest fine for violations of this kind ever levied in North Carolina. On the other hand, it seems a ridiculously small fine for operating a plant under conditions that killed 25 people. Does it send a serious message to other companies that put their profits above the safety of their employees? Are workers in North Carolina's other nonunionized workplaces much
safer now?
It's fashionable to say that unions aren't necessary anymore. They were important in the bad, old days when individual workers were helpless and subject to exploitation by unscrupulous bosses. Nowadays, employers are said to be more enlightened. And if they aren't, a worker can take advantage of our enlightened labor laws to complain about working conditions that are unfair or dangerous. That sounds good, but the reality is not that simple.
Even good labor laws are no protection if the government can't afford to hire people to enforce them -- or if the punishment meted out to offenders is little more than a reprimand. It's also true that even good laws are not self-enforcing. They won't work unless employees complain about infringements. But how many people would be willing to risk their jobs by calling an inspector to a workplace where there's no union? And, without the support of a union, how many are wealthy -- or crazy -- enough to challenge an employer to get their rights under the law?
My mother also used to say that some bosses were monsters but most were not. Bosses made their money by saving a penny here and a penny there. And if they ignored some safety precautions, that was often because the possibility of an accident seemed remote while the likelihood of making a profit was right there. That didn't make all bosses evil, she said, but it did mean that workers needed unions to protect their interests. Most workers still need that protection. The 80 years between the Triangle Shirt Waist fire and the tragedy in Hamlet, N.C., have changed many things, but that's not one of them.