Posted on 01/09/2003 5:38:31 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
TYLER, Texas -- It is said that only the desperate seek work at Tyler Pipe, a sprawling, rusting pipe foundry out on Route 69, just past the flea market. Behind a high metal fence lies a workplace that is part Dickens and part Darwin, a dim, dirty, hellishly hot place where men are regularly disfigured by amputations and burns, where turnover is so high that convicts are recruited from local prisons, where some workers urinate in their pants because their bosses refuse to let them step away from the manufacturing line for even a few moments.
Rolan Hoskin was from the ranks of the desperate. His life was a tailspin of unemployment, debt and divorce. A master electrician, 48, he had retreated to a low-rent apartment on the outskirts of town and taken an entry-level maintenance job on the graveyard shift at Tyler Pipe.
He would come home covered in fine black soot, utterly drained and dreading the next shift. "I don't know if I'm going to last another week," his twin brother recalls him saying. The job scared him; he didn't know what he was doing. But the pay was decent, just under $10 an hour, and his electricity was close to being cut off. "He was just trying to make it," his daughter said.
On June 29, 2000, in his second month on the job, Hoskin descended into a deep pit under a huge molding machine and set to work on an aging, balky conveyor belt that carried sand. Federal regulations require safety guards on conveyor belts to prevent workers from getting caught and crushed. They also require that belts be shut down when maintenance is done on them.
But this belt was not shut down, federal records show. Nor was it protected by metal safety guards. That night, Hoskin had been trained to adjust the belt while it was still running. Less downtime that way, the men said. Now it was about 4 a.m., and Hoskin was alone in the cramped, dark pit. The din was deafening, the footing treacherous under drifts of black sand.
He was found on his knees. His left arm had been crushed first, the skin torn off. Then, his head had been pulled between belt and rollers. His skull had split.
It was not just a conveyor belt that claimed Hoskin's life that warm summer night. He also fell victim to a way of doing business that has produced vast profits and, as the plant's owners have admitted in federal court, deliberate indifference to the safety of workers at Tyler Pipe.
Hoskin worked for McWane Inc., a privately held company based in Birmingham, Alabama, that owns Tyler Pipe and is one of the world's largest manufacturers of cast-iron sewer and water pipe. It is also one of the most dangerous employers in America, according to a nine-month examination by The New York Times, the PBS television program "Frontline" and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
Since 1995, at least 4,600 injuries have been recorded in McWane foundries, many hundreds of them serious, company documents show. Nine workers, including Hoskin, have been killed. McWane plants, which employ about 5,000 workers, have been cited for more than 400 federal health and safety violations, far more than their six major competitors combined.
No McWane executive would be interviewed on the record. But in a series of written responses, the company's president, Ruffner Page, acknowledged "serious mistakes" and expressed deep regret for Hoskin's death. "Our intensified focus on safety speaks to lessons learned," he wrote. At the same time, he sought to explain and strongly defend the company's business methods.
"Over the years, McWane has grown by the acquisition of troubled companies that had become uncompetitive," he wrote. "Through substantial investment in new plant and equipment and more disciplined management practices, McWane transformed these underperforming companies into efficient and viable operations." He said disciplined management had allowed McWane to stave off foreign competitors who have no regard for safety.
The company's managers call it "the McWane way."
The story of Tyler Pipe, drawn from company and government documents and interviews with dozens of current and former workers and managers, is a case study in the application of the McWane way. It is the anatomy of a workplace where, federal officials and employees say, nearly everything - safety programs, environmental controls, even the smallest federally mandated precautions that might have kept Rolan Hoskin alive - has been subordinated to production, to the commandment to keep the pipe rolling off the line.
Safety inspectors tried to make a difference. They cited and fined and cajoled. But for years, records show, little changed. Which is why even now the toughest of Tyler Pipe veterans remember the day McWane came to town as the day they were, as one of them put it, "kicked into hell."
The pipe foundry occupies several hundred acres. Its smokestacks rise high above a north and south plant, each with its own cupola, a multistory furnace that melts tons of scrap metal to produce smoky white rivers of molten iron. The molten iron is poured into spinning cylinders to form pipes, into molds of packed black sand to make fittings.
The company would not let a reporter tour the plant. But employees describe simply stepping inside as an overwhelming experience. First is the heat, wave upon wave of it, sometimes in excess of 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54 degrees centigrade). Then there is the noise - of pipe slamming into pipe, of pneumatic tools that grind and cut, of massive machines that shudder and shake, of honking forklifts and roaring exhaust systems. Dust and fumes choke the lungs and coat the lights, leaving the plant floor a spectral labyrinth of glowing pipes and blackened machinery.
In late 1995, the Tyler Corp. sold the foundry to McWane. In one stroke, McWane had bought one of its main rivals and acquired its largest plant.
Within weeks, senior executives flew in from Birmingham and set about executing a plan of stunning audacity: Over the next two years, they cut nearly two-thirds of the employees yet insisted that production continue apace. Anyone not essential to the production of pipe was dispensable. They eliminated quality control inspectors and safety inspectors, pollution control personnel and relief workers, cleaning and maintenance workers.
To keep up production, McWane eliminated one of three shifts. Instead of three shifts of eight hours, everyone would work one of two 12-hour shifts. At the end of a shift, supervisors often marched through yelling, "Four more hours!" So employees worked 16-hour days, sometimes seven days a week.
Men who operated one machine were ordered to operate three at a time. Breaks were allowed only if a relief worker was available, but McWane had reduced the number of relief workers, and the company forbade supervisors to fill in for hourly workers. The policy hit hardest near iron-pouring stations, where workers had to drink plenty of fluids to withstand the heat. The humiliating result, six workers said in separate interviews, was that men were sometimes forced to urinate in their pants or risk heat exhaustion.
Morale plummeted, but profits soared. Senior managers say they were told that Tyler Pipe earned more than $50 million in 1996 - double the reported profits for the five-year period before McWane arrived.
Four years after the takeover, a team of inspectors from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration spent several days taking the measure of the new regime. They found more than 150 safety hazards. They found poorly maintained equipment and a work force that was poorly trained, ill equipped, overworked.
"Throughout the plant, molten metal is seen spilling from the cupolas, bulls and ladles," their report said. "The forklift trucks transport the metal, and the ground behind the trucks often smokes with puddles of molten metal. Workers are covered with black residue from the foundry sand. Many work areas are dark, due to poor lighting and clouds of sand. Despite all the ignition and fuel sources, exit paths are not obvious. Many workers have scars or disfigurations that are noticeable from several feet away. Burns and amputations are frequent.
"This facility is located in a relatively small town where jobs are not plentiful. Throughout the plant, in supervisors' offices and on bulletin boards, next to production charts and union memos, is posted in big orange letters: REDUCE MAN HOURS PER TON."
McWane's senior executives, including Phillip McWane, chairman and chief executive, received regular reports from all plants. The reports seemed to measure everything - injuries, lost work hours, dismissals, operating margins. By 2000, it was clear that Tyler Pipe had become very profitable. It was also clear that something was very wrong. Red flags were everywhere.
There had been three deaths since the takeover. The injury rate was climbing, the company's own reports showed. "Safety is without a doubt one of our worst areas," Dick Stoker, the works manager, wrote in a confidential memorandum to top supervisors. "I have failed in this area, but I can promise you that we will not fail to improve in this area come 2001."
In March of that year, state environmental investigators spent several days at Tyler Pipe. They found that the plant had failed to get required permits. It had failed to properly maintain pollution controls. It had failed to maintain its wastewater treatment lagoons. It had failed to keep inspection records. The list ran on and on.
With federal regulators lurking, Stoker told his staff, "We are so far out of compliance at Tyler Pipe that I cannot begin to cover our needs in this letter."
Even so, in a January 2001 memorandum, senior McWane executives outlined an environmental upgrade at Tyler Pipe and several other plants that was relatively low cost - outside audits, better training, improved manuals, an annual company environmental conference.
The company's biggest worries had to do with safety. Texas workers' compensation laws give McWane broad immunity from negligence lawsuits but required it to pay medical bills and lost wages for injured workers. Company executives complained that they were "hemorrhaging" money on workers' compensation - many millions of dollars a year and rising.Once again, the company chose a minimalist approach, according to company and federal records and former safety and health employees. It devised a system of "workers' compensation cost control techniques" that shifted responsibility for safety problems onto the workers themselves. It was a system that assumed widespread fraud and often subjected workers reporting injuries to disciplinary action, and sometimes firing, for violating safety rules.
"Whether the employee is 100 percent or 5 percent at fault is irrelevant," wrote Stephen Smith, then president of the McWane subsidiary that owns Tyler Pipe.
In 2000 and 2001, company records show, more than 350 workers were subjected to disciplinary actions - known as DAs - after reporting injuries. "All disciplines short of termination is administered with the intent and purpose to teach," the plant's employee handbook explained.
But federal inspectors concluded that the system was used not to teach but to punish. Disciplinary action was meted out if it was the fault of the employee or not, they said.
Even longtime employees with exemplary work records could be fired for a single DA. Employees say they learned to keep injuries a secret.
In his response, the McWane president, Page, said no Tyler Pipe worker had been fired in retaliation for reporting an injury. He said managers were encouraged to enforce safety rules "so that there would be no doubt about management's commitment to the safety program." He added, "No judge or jury has ever concluded that Tyler Pipe acted improperly."
Last summer, Tyler pleaded guilty in federal court to deliberately ignoring safety rules that could have saved Hoskin's life. In the fall, McWane reached a settlement with Occupational Safety and Health Administration, admitting that it had willfully violated safety rules a dozen times.
But Tyler Pipe remains a dangerous place to work, company records show. A recently completed internal safety audit found 1,219 hazards.
This article is just another example of the desperate hysteria that pervades the Left when they lose power.
Tyler Corp is a most interesting example of a company that transformed themselves from a smokestack industry into an information technology company.
But federal inspectors concluded that the system was used not to teach but to punish. Disciplinary action was meted out if it was the fault of the employee or not, they said.
That sounds a lot like the way that traffic accidents (and non-crimes and other incidents) are punished by the government - even when the driver (or accused, or whatever) is not at fault, the government somehow almost always feels that it's necessary to assign blame, assess a fine, coerce some kind of admission that will stick to the accused forever, etc. (unless maybe you're a Clinton or a Kennedy, but even that may be wearing off)
Prosecutors are generally reluctant to drop charges - but will often bargain in bad faith, trump up the original charge, then bargain it down to an unfair plea deal or else the hapless victim gets to face the possibility of an even more cruel and unwarranted punishment - they seem to feel that some punishment is necessary, whether the person did anything wrong or not. It works that way because evidently there is some reward, explicit or not, for the prosecutor, for the police, for various government case workers, and for the criminal justice system as a whole if they get a "win", no matter whether it is justified or not. All of the power is on the side of the government. And their power is almost unchecked - even if the accused is successful in defending their case, being absolved often carries such a stiff financial burden that they are almost as bad off as if they had capitulated to the government.
So, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and PBS/Frontline, if behavior like that is acceptable for the government, what's so wrong with it in the private sector?
Well, I guess it can be described as capitalism, however, it is this type of "capitalism" which gives energy to leftists. I think our nation could survive without this type of nonsense.
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