TEXAS CITY, Tex. — While the world was focused on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP refinery here released huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the air that went unnoticed by residents until many saw their children come down with respiratory problems.
For 40 days after a piece of equipment critical to the refinery’s operation broke down, a total of 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals, including the carcinogen benzene, poured out of the refinery.
Rather than taking the costly step of shutting down the refinery to make repairs, the engineers at the plant diverted gases to a smokestack and tried to burn them off, but hundreds of thousands of pounds still escaped into the air, according to state environmental officials.
This plant has a history – in 2005, 15 people were killed and more than 170 injured in an explosion, and it’s been sued by the state for pollution violations.
Events like this show the interconnection of safety for workers on the job and families in their homes. Unsafe workplaces are also likely to be the ones that reach out and harm people for miles around by polluting the air and water; companies that profit by endangering their workers are likely to be the ones that don’t worry too much about the air their neighbors breathe.
The song tells the story of a mill fire in which workers were killed because they were locked in. It’s a story that’s been lived out too many times—and, as Tim Eriksen and Riley Baugus noted while playing the song in a recent concert, though this song is historical, the practice of locking workers in is unfortunately not left far enough in the past. They pointed to the 1991 Hamlet chicken processing plant fire as an example, but in many more recent cases workers have reported being locked into other workplaces. Wal-Mart employees, for instance, were locked in overnight until very recently (assuming the store’s claims to have stopped the practice are truthful). They had one single fire door, but were forbidden to use it and in several cases, a needed trip to the hospital was delayed. And that fire door they were forbidden to use? Wal-Mart used to keep fire doors chained until an employee died because paramedics couldn’t get in.
And it’s a pretty safe bet that somewhere in America, there are still workers in a building where there’s no exit even in case of fire.
I came from a strong working class family. I joined a company that was family owned and treated its employees better than anyone else in town. So, you can imagine my surprise when, years later, I became a Transportation Security Administration Officer…an airport screener to the lay person. If private concerns treated their people well, imagine how much better the Federal Government would be.
I was wrong. The Federal Government is little more than a really, really big corporation that doesn’t want to go under, and crunches numbers instead of listening to people. In its vast size, TSA is top heavy without realizing that the left hand doesn’t know what the rights hand is doing. It’s simply too big to be efficient.
So there are flaws, the biggest one being the lack of collective bargaining rights. Oh sure, we have a Union, but no contract. The official statement of the Government, I was told at orientation, is “we don’t acknowledge a union.” Now that the Union has helped Congress created bill H.R. 1881 demanding collective bargaining rights, everything has been stonewalled. Appointments, committees, votes…all on hold for now. And screeners are hanging in the lurch.
We accrue sick leave but are reprimanded when we use it. We are told we must follow Standard Operating Procedures (SOP), but because they are considered “security sensitive information”, there is no printed copy available for us to read. Instead, we’re allowed one hour a week to log onto government computers and request a disc to look at. When we violate the SOP we again are reprimanded. The SOP is so convoluted even our Supervisors are unclear about it.
Despite a sanctioned Safety Committee, we are the walking wounded. We get hurt lugging oversized baggage, we get bumped and trampled in a crowded airport checkpoint, and get worn down from having to follow protocol of carrying everything to an inspection table 30 feet away, searching the bag then rerunning it through the x-ray. Once, twice maybe. But dozens upon dozens of times a day and the body starts to rebel. Those injured are put on workers compensation and are placed in useless, humiliating places around the airport. Rather than rethink how the checkpoint is laid out, management tries to find newer ways to expedite the passenger lines.
My point is, there’s more to a good job than a good wage and good benefits. Employees must be treated with respect and listened to. When you feel that you’re a very small cog in a very big wheel, you lose your incentive to be your best. If employers don’t value their personnel, they’re missing out on a valuable asset that could so easily be realized.
