the Assembly: “On the morning of Sept. 3, 1991, as workers returned from the Labor Day holiday, a huge grease fire tore through a chicken-processing plant in remote Hamlet, N.C., near the South Carolina line. Employees rushed through the chaos to escape but were blocked by locked exit doors. Twenty-five people died.
That day, the state revealed that none of its workplace safety inspectors had ever visited the Imperial Food Products plant in its 11 years of operation….
It remained a political touchpoint through the 1992 Democratic National Convention, as the Reverend Jesse Jackson told the nation, “If we work together, and if we keep Hamlet, North Carolina, in our hearts and before our eyes, we will act to empower working people.”
Three decades have passed and memories have faded. While the deaths led to a reassessment of the state’s emaciated safety program and the hiring of dozens of new workplace inspectors, the reform momentum prompted by the fire is long gone. An Assembly review of 30 years of workplace safety data in North Carolina shows that several key indicators are moving in the wrong direction, making this a fraught time for the state’s workers.”