This is the grave of Emmett Roe.

You have likely never heard of Emmett Roe. But he was a murderous horrible person, one who made America worse for his existing. In fact, I don’t know all that much about much of his life. He was born in 1927 and grew up in the capitol region of New York. He went into food processing as a young man, based mostly in Troy, New York. He worked for Empire Foods and in 1960, left Troy to become a manager at a chicken plant in Moosic, Pennsylvania. Early in his career, he seems to have believed that labor and management should work together, common in the era of union power. That did not last long. But employees who remembered him in Moosic recalled him working on the lines with them when it got busy and caring when they got hurt. He was certainly known for his temper, but he would also hold big clambakes every summer and he doesn’t seem to have been worse than many other employers.

In 1970, Roe left Empire to run some fried chicken restaurants. They went belly up in 1973. He went back to Moosic, mortgaged his home, and bought the Empire factory. He renamed it Imperial. But he did not see Pennsylvania as his future. See, labor was cheaper elsewhere. In those years, the workers had unionized with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Retail Clerks. Roe hated unions. He was so angry that anyone would dare tell him how to run his factory that he decided to close it and move to antiunion locations in the South.

Among other states, Roe chose North Carolina. A state in bed with the agricultural industry if there ever was one, North Carolina regulators never inspected the factory because the budget for inspections was minuscule. In 11 years of operation, it received no fire inspections. The factory did undergo repeated inspections from the company’s poultry inspector. Workers complained about the terrible smell and quality of meat, with at least one telling an inspector that the meat processed into chicken nuggets was particularly awful. According to one survivor of the fire, the plant managers locked the door to stop workers from stealing chicken. This was the same excuse sweatshop managers gave to locking the doors at Triangle when that disaster killed 146 workers in 1911. Roe loathed his own workers. He saw them as dumb blacks, animals basically. He used to rant about how they would steal everything, even though there wasn’t any evidence for this. I suppose it did happen some, but it’s not as if was crushing his profit margins or anything. He just saw workers as the enemy. Roe, now working with his son Brad, also produced nasty meat, forcing workers to package chicken that had fallen on the floor.

So on September 3, 1991, thanks to Roe being a cheap bastard who didn’t care about the lives of workers, his chicken factory in Hamlet, North Carolina burned. He killed 25 workers that day.

The fire began when the deep fryer caught fire after a hydraulic line to a cooking vat failed, with obvious problems with it not found because of the company’s indifferent safety culture. It spread very quickly thanks to a combination of burning cooking oil, insulation, and exploding gas lines hanging from the ceiling. It didn’t help that all of the phones inside the building were nonfunctional. The workers at the front of the plant all managed to get out. But at the back of the plant the company did not place any fire alarms. Moreover, Imperial managers not only locked all the exits but sealed the windows as well. Those workers had nowhere to go. As an old plant, it was a maze of paths inside. The smoke meant they couldn’t find their way to the front. They were doomed. Like at Triangle, some workers did get out the back by breaking open a locked loading bay, but many died. On one door, near charred bodies, blackened footprints could still be seen, signs of the desperate attempt to escape. Eighteen of the dead were women. Most of the dead were African-American.

Roe basically didn’t care. He was angry that his investments in other plants around the South and in the beef industry in Colorado had not worked out. Dead workers were the least of his concerns and he showed little to no regret through the entire process after the fire.

There was both a state and a federal investigation of the fire. The state passed the buck. The state labor commissioner said that his department did not have enough money (true, thanks to the notoriously anti-labor North Carolina legislature. Even today, NC has the lowest union density rate in the nation. He also blamed the federal government for not enforcing safety standards (OK, but that is indeed passing the buck). As it turned out, Roe had not even filed basic paperwork with the state. He was notorious for ignoring both state and federal law, such as closing an Alabama factory without giving workers the legally required notice. He hadn’t filed for a business license in North Carolina! But this “pro-business” state just ignored all that stuff until they had federal investigations coming.

Three men faced charges for the fire. Roe, his son, and the plant manager all took plea bargains. Since Roe had personally directed the locking of the doors, he received a prison sentence of nearly 20 years, less than a year for each of the murders he committed. He served four years in prison. Imperial Foods also received an $800,000 fine. The factory was never reopened. 215 people lost their jobs. The federal government ordered North Carolina to improve its worker safety legislation or the government would do it for them. This did lead to the passage of 14 new laws, including a whistleblower law, as well as a near doubling of state workplace safety inspectors. The enforcement of all of this was still pretty not great.

Roe served four years. Given the impunity CEOs almost always have in this country, it’s kind of amazing. It was amazing enough that Don Blankenship, murderer of coal miners at Upper Big Branch in West Virginia, served a year in prison, during which he refashioned himself as a political prisoner and started what he hoped would be far-right campaigns for political office. Four years, that’s almost impossible to imagine for a murderous CEO today.

Roe spent the last years of life in Roswell, Georgia. He died in 2018, at the age of 91.

Emmett Roe is buried in St. Patrick Cemetery, Colonie, New York.

If you’d like this series to visit other murderers of workers, all of whom I hope are burning in Hell, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Oddly, both of the owners of the Triangle Fire largely disappeared from the record after the fire, though we know that they were later fined for opening another factory and locking the doors once again, as we know that employers who kill once will kill again. Thomas Drummond, the judge who ordered the military to crush the Great Railroad Strike in 1877, is in Chicago. Karl Linderfelt, the Colorado National Guard officer who murdered Louis Tikas to begin the Ludlow Massacre, is in Los Angeles. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

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Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
If someone does this and does, the liability lies with Canada.

hahaha ok then.

Thanks to Crystal for sending from over the weekend.

This is obvious in theory, and this is evident wherever it’s been tried. The chaos is the point [free link]:

Many of the Republicans pushing for Medicaid work requirements — permanent program cuts that will strip up to 14 million people of their health care coverage — likely have no idea what it takes to comply with them. We do. As legal aid lawyers, we were on the front lines helping low-income people in Arkansas keep their health care coverage when the state rolled out work requirements in 2018. The policy caused chaos for everyone involved: people receiving Medicaid, hospitals and health clinics, pharmacies, social services organizations and state agency caseworkers. No officials serious about governing should willingly create such problems for their own state.

Over 18,160 people in Arkansas lost coverage in only five months before courts halted the policy. Many were our clients. Adrian McGonigal had chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, for which he received treatment. At the time he held a job working 30 to 40 hours a week at a poultry plant, which paid more than any other job he’d had before and should have satisfied the requirement. But the state’s system for automatically identifying working people was faulty, and Mr. McGonigal struggled to navigate the complex monthly reporting system on his own. Unable to report his work, he lost Medicaid, couldn’t afford his C.O.P.D. medications, wound up in the hospital emergency room several times, lost his job and never fully recovered. For the next several years he struggled in various minimum-wage jobs, earning much less than he had at the poultry plant. Sadly, he died in November.

We saw many working people face similar challenges. Our clients ran the gamut of low-wage work: fast food workers, restaurant dishwashers and servers, construction workers, janitors, landscapers, motel cleaners, gas station clerks and nursing assistants. Many had disabilities, and their ability to continue working depended on getting treatment to manage chronic pain, asthma, injuries, cancer and mental health conditions. Some lost coverage simply because they couldn’t navigate the policy’s complicated requirements and labyrinthine reporting process. Others lost insurance because of the instability of low-wage work: Bosses cut their hours or laid them off without warning, limited public transit narrowed their options or they lived in struggling rural areas where jobs were hard to come by. When the state cut them off, their health worsened and many lost jobs, as well as the ability to work new ones.

Nobody on Medicaid was free from the tumult. Despite outreach from the state, there was widespread panic, as people didn’t know if they had the type of Medicaid that the new requirements applied to. People received confusing 10-page letters from the state Medicaid office, which often contradicted other coverage letters people received around the same time. The website to report compliance shut down every night at 9 p.m., and when it was running, it was so complex that we put together video tutorials to help people navigate it successfully. (Many still couldn’t.) People spent hours on the phone or at agency offices trying to figure out their status or fix errors, often needing a lawyer’s help. In some cases, they had to pester their employers for extra proof of wages or statements that met the state’s requirements. All told, 18,164 people were terminated because of noncompliance with the work requirements, and thousands more people lost coverage because of related paperwork burdens.

Sowing anxiety and panic, depriving vulnerable people of their access to healthcare — it’s not just the outcome of the policy, it’s the reason. The dark cynicism here is to make people think that it’s their fault that they’re losing their insurance, and this is how Republicans will sell it — this isn’t really a “cut,” it’s just taking healthcare away from poor people who aren’t “deserving.” I don’t think this lie will work on the public if the policy is enacted, but it’s as much about convincing themselves (and perhaps some gullible reporters) as anything.

It also can’t be said enough that the red line for front line House Republicans isn’t mitigating these cuts, it’s securing another upper-class tax cut.

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On June 8, 1909 Washington’s pioneering anti-tipping law went into effect. A goal of a lot of Progressives, this law attempted to end a labor practice that for the middle class who supported it, was annoying. The law did not last long, repealed four years later. Unfortunately, that practice still continues today, stronger than ever despite growing grumbling about it. But there’s probably not much we can do about it.

Washington was a strong state for Progressives, as was Oregon. In fact, the most Progressive states then are quite often the most liberal states now, in case you think there’s any hope to ever turn the South or Great Plains liberal. Good luck with that one. Anyway, many Progressives saw tipping as a malicious practice. Progressives did not have a lot of subtlety in their politics, so tipping wasn’t just bad, it was evil. It needed to be eliminated. Not surprisingly for these Progressives, the real problem here was service workers begging for extra money. Said the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

“Men who rely on tips to support their families, instead of relying upon the value of the services they render the man who employs them, are going through life with the wrong idea.

“What is a tip? If a tip is a mere gratuity, it is beggarly for a man to accept it. If it is a reward for good service, it can be said that the waiters ought to give good service without exacting extra pay, and if it is a reward for the waiter’s special effort to give his patron a little [of] the best of it, the acceptance of a tip is indefensible on moral grounds, for the waiter who will given [sic] one patron the best of it, will give either his employer or some other patron the worst of it.

“Of course legislating against tips is at best rather freakish and it ought not be necessary; but giving and receiving tips has posed a problem of some importance, and the lawmakers of this state simply undertook to solve it. It isn’t a good practice to accept tips, and if waiters can’t make a living without it, they will probably find it to their moral advantage to enter into some other field of employment” 

The Washington legislature wasn’t messing around here. It criminalized tipping, making both tipping and accepting a tip a misdemeanor. The state hoped it would begin a national movement to criminalize the practice.

Now, tipping was and remains a problematic practice, but not for the reasons the Post-Intelligencer or the architects of this law believed. Tips exist so that you can pay workers next to nothing and then give them bits if they are obsequious enough. Like so much about American labor, this had it start in the United States with slavemasters and their slaves and then became part of the Black service economy after the Civil War, with the rise of sleeping car porters employed by the vile George Pullman as one prominent example.

The problem with the law of course was that this was unenforceable. Who was going to enforce it? The cops were going to bust up a place over $1? Like much Progressive legislation, this was enacted without really asking the workers what they wanted or thinking through the enforcement mechanism. Progressives were the ultimate middle and upper-class liberals who thought they knew what was best for the people and so just forced the law through without thinking through the consequences. Glad liberals never do that today……

Anyway, Washington repealed its law in 1913, after it was proven totally unenforceable and not worth having. Of all the states to follow Washington, the one you’d least expect is probably Mississippi, but it passed a similar law in 1912 and that remained on the books until 1926. Tennessee did the same in 1915 and that was repealed in 1925. In fact, I think the reason it became popular in the South was for racial reasons, another way to keep Black workers in poverty.

Tipping naturally remains a big part of our economy today. It never went away, despite the occasional freakouts about it. The 1916 pamphlet that I used as the picture to top this post is one example, but really, it continues today. People are increasingly angry and confused about the rapid spread of tipping culture outside of just restaurants and haircuts and into seemingly every transaction we make, especially since it’s almost all electronic today and thus semi-anonymous. Interestingly, this anonymity seems to lead to more guilt about not tipping than anything else, so it continues and grows.

For me, tipping is one of those things that simply exists. Yes, in an ideal world, we’d get rid of it. Yes, it has gotten out of control. The tipped minimum wage is an abomation and that $2.13 an hour tipped minimum wage still exists in some states. So the first thing you have to do to get rid of tipping is get rid of the tipped minimum wage. But even that is not going to do it because who can live on anything close to the minimum wage? You need to raise wages significantly above that. I happen to love a place that has high wages and does not accept tips, but there aren’t too many of them and customers might blanche at the higher listed prices that work the cost of labor properly into the pricing.

The problem though is that both the customers and many of the workers like tipping. Customers like it because it allows them to hold power over workers and this is disgusting. But it’s also a fact of life. But workers tend to like it because they can make significantly more money than they would under a typical wage system. This is of course more true at high end restaurants and bars than it is at your local diner or burger job or dive bar. But what we have found is that restaurant workers themselves are often pretty active in opposing anti-tipping legislation. I don’t blame them. We are asking them to be the experiment in our desire to eliminate tipping. Fighting for what you know and works well enough for you seems to be a reasonable response to the situation, even if it less than idea policy.

In any case, don’t be an asshole. Tip your waitstaff and bar tenders and do so generously. You aren’t solving any problems by being That Guy. Never be That Guy.

This is the 567th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

The post This Day in Labor History: June 8, 1909 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Growing up on the West Coast in the 1930s, young Japanese American women seeking life tips had one stalwart source of advice: the “I’m Telling You, Deirdre” column. Deirdre was the pen name of Mollie “Mollie” Oyama Mittwer, a second-generation Japanese American (Nisei) writer working as advice columnist for the San Francisco-based community newspaper New World-Sun from 1935 to 1941.

“The more I delved into the background of the witty and opinionated ‘Deirdre,’” historian Valerie Matsumoto writes, “the more aware I became of the active network of Japanese-American women and men writers and the breadth of the cultural and social issues they tackled.” For instance, in a 1939 column titled “Housewives Have No Spare Time,” Deirdre “presaged the discontent Betty Friedan would later examine in The Feminine Mystique.”

“As hard as I’m toiling around the house, my folks complain and think that I’m not doing enough. It’s aggravating, really,” Deirdre wrote—a lament that would not be out of place even today. Deirdre advertised herself as “happy to answer any question put her concerning family affairs, love and other sex problems, social etiquette and other personal questions.”

Yet Matsumoto considers Deirdre’s role “far more complex than that of mainstream etiquette mavens,” noting that “[h]er task was to provide the Nisei with guidelines to proper behavior that would enable them to navigate safely the social conventions of the white world as well as to meet the standards of their parents and the Japanese-American community.”

Born Mary Oyama in 1907, Mittwer began her career as a journalist in her twenties and contributed to a range of Japanese American publications in Los Angeles and San Francisco. She was among the nine women (and fifteen men) featured in a 1940 article on “Who’s Who in the Nisei Literary World,” alongside other budding luminaries such as the author Hisaye Yamamoto.

Unsurprisingly, “[m]arriage was a recurrent theme in Deirdre’s column,” Matsumoto writes. Amid changing generational and cultural values, Deirdre addressed debates such as love versus arranged matches and whether urban women should marry farmers.

“Tensions surrounding the issues of courtship and marriage were compounded when the factor of race entered the picture,” Matsumoto adds. For example, one of Deirdre’s readers sent in a letter in late 1935 complaining that his sister had drawn flak for her relationship with a Chinese American man, “as if that were a great social crime.”

Perhaps coincidentally, Deirdre had recently praised a Nisei woman for dating a white man. The woman was quoted as saying, “It’s about time we Nisei and we Japanese got over our prejudices. You must admit that a lot of us have them, too.”

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But, at the same time, the columns emphasized that the cross-ethnic relationships featured were “perfectly platonic,” sometimes calling the woman “too young to be thinking about such things.”

Such rhetoric could be a way of “skirting the issue of interethnic sexual relations” and moving the issue to “the less threatening ground of casual camaraderie,” explains Matsumoto. “We are reminded simultaneously of the strength of prevailing norms and the presence of a small minority who pushed against sociocultural boundaries, both ethnic and mainstream.”

In fact, Mittwer’s husband, Frederick, whom she married at thirty—which Matsumoto notes was “late for a Nisei”—was a mixed-race man who also worked for a Japanese American newspaper. Moreover, Matsumoto describes Mittwer as expressing “strong concerns regarding multicultural relations. She never tired of trying to push her readers to ‘mix’ socially with non-Japanese, and to politicize her readers—as minority people and as citizens.”

Replying to a question on “whether the Nisei could be assimilated into US life,” Deirdre quoted an argument that “we already are quite thoroughly Americanized…rather it is a question of: ‘How far are the Americans willing to LET US BECOME ASSIMILATED.’”

Her columns also featured conversations with second-generation writers from other ethnic backgrounds, such as Armenian American Leon Surmelian and Italian American John Fante (“a Nisei like the rest of us, as he was born in the United States”). Matsumoto observes the African Americans were missing from this glowing coverage of other minorities—perhaps as a result of racial prejudice among Japanese Americans.

“Nonetheless,” she writes, “it is clear that Nisei writers looked both into their own community and out into the large society for inspiration in grappling with the articulation of a distinctive American ethnic identities.”

Prewar writing like Mittwer’s “brings to light the talents and concerns of the Nisei,” Matsumoto concludes, while “open[ing] up critical questions” about race relations and women’s experiences.

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