ABSTRACT
In Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, David Harvey discusses the September 1991 fire at the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, which claimed the lives of twenty-five workers and injured fifty-six more (Harvey 1996: 334-6). Harvey notes that the recent growth of rural industries in the United States has swollen the numbers of factories attempting to take advantage of a “relatively isolated industrial reserve army” left behind by the decline of agricultural employment (ibid.: 336-7). He suggests that this expansion of industrial capital into rural areas is part of a broader historical tendency of capital to seek out lower wage locations and non-union workforces, thus undermining the ability of larger groups of workers in core industrial areas to place regulatory constraints on the accumulation process. The result of this geographically based attack by capital on labor regulation is the re-emergence within the United States of “a totally unsubtle form of coercive exploitation which is pre-rather than post-Fordist in form” (ibid.: 337). Like earlier pre-Fordist forms of exploitation, the new pre-Fordism makes ample use of the vulnerabilities and disempowerment of groups such as women and people of color: eighteen of the twenty-five workers who died at Hamlet were women, and twelve were Black. Thus, the Hamlet victims are descended from the 146 workers, most of them women and all of them recent immigrants, who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (Harvey 1996: 336; Greider 1997: 337-8).
