North Carolina's lack of workplace inspections is a decades-old issue.

The Dilworth construction site where three men fell to their deaths on Jan. 2 had never been inspected by the North Carolina Department of Labor. That isn’t uncommon. North Carolina has about one compliance officer per county to conduct safety inspections. Many work sites are never inspected — unless there’s a tragedy. Carol Brooke, senior attorney at the North Carolina Justice Center, says the state has grappled with this problem since at least the early '90s, when 25 poultry workers died in a fire, while locked inside the Imperial Food Products plant in […]