Friday, February 1 marked, among other things, two months since the work-place deaths of Victor & Carlos Diaz, which occurred while they were cleaning out a 20,000 gallon dilution tank inside the North East Linen plant, an industrial laundry in Linden NJ -- with no respiratory protection at all. (For those who are new to the story and want prior stories with hot links , try my prior posts here , [1] here, [2] here [3] and here [4]. )
Since last I wrote about the Diaz deaths, I’ve learned more both about the state of work site danger and illness and about the events of Dec. 1 at North East Linen. I’ve talked to experts, studied the testimony of witnesses at a Congressional hearing and listened to the stories of individual current and former employees. All of the current and former employees demanded that I not identify them and I won’t. Most of them spoke much more Spanish than English and I heard their stories with the help of translators. So what I know so far is not complete and relies, in part, on third-parties. In addition, management of North East Linen has, thus far, declined to respond to my requests to talk to them. If, as a result, I’m making a mistake, tell me and I’ll try to fix it.
Do you ever get so interested in a subject you chatter on about it while everyone’s eyes are glazing over? This may have happened to me here. So, if you are not interested and only want the punch line it is this: Workers are more at risk of injury, disease and death at work if they work in non-union settings. Unions, which represent an ever shrinking portion of US workers, help workers force management to focus on safety and health issues. I conclude from that that national safety & health improvements on the job will come only after we drive from office Mr. Bush and his Congressional supporters.
There are two parts to the story – unions and safety audits & training.
Unions Workers without unions lack leverage to make management pay attention to the workplace dangers they put their employees into. This point was eloquently made by Eric Frumin, the Safety & Health Director [5] of Unite-Here [6] the union which has been trying to represent North East Linen workers.
Sewell Chan writing in the New York Times made the same point in the context of fatalities in the NYC construction industry. [7] in Nov, 2006:
Of the 28 incidents in which the 29 workers were killed, 19 involved companies with 10 or fewer workers and 21 involved workers who were immigrants or had limited English proficiency and 24 involved nonunionized workers.(Thanks, by the way to Joe638 [8] for digging out the article).
Chan shows that the people who died were overwhelmingly workers in non union settings. Many had limited English skills. Does this bring to mind the deaths of Victor and Carlos Diaz? Further, of course, North East Linen has been accused of firing a worker for union activity. A hearing on the formal complaint by the National Labor Relations Board is scheduled for the end of February. Can you understand why the people who talked to me want to remain anonymous?
Electing a Democratic president and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress are steps essential to increasing safety and health at work. Enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act (vetoed by Mr. Bush), promulgation of the “muscular-skeleto†injury standards (abandoned by Mr. Bush) and replacement of the solidly anti-union National Labor Relations Board will go a long way towards improving workplace safety.
Safety Audits & Training. North East Linen has a sister plant in New Haven Ct. under common ownership and management at which OSHA told the owner that he needed to evaluate the dangers of workers operating in confined spaces. The owner definitely did not apply that directive to his Linden, NJ facility. Had he done so, the hazard of cleaning out the 20,000 gallon dilution tank would have been identified and protective work procedures would have been instituted. Victor & Carlos Diaz would have had training, supplied-oxygen, safety harnesses and would have worked only under an on-site supervisor who would have pulled them to safety at the first sign of trouble.
Federal law allows owners to ask for a complete confidential safety audit and/or for worker hazard training. Owners can get the training without the audit and that’s what happened here. The training report is supposed to be confidential but it was leaked and -- by begging leakees-- I got a copy too. The consultant, an employee of the State of New Jersey, provided very general training about caustic chemicals workers might come into contact with. Because many of them speak limited English, the training was conducted in Spanish.
Because there was no audit the trainer could not and did not identify the tank as a dangerous place. No one of the workers’ regular job duty included the cleaning tank (especially not Victor, a driver, and Carlos, a laborer, by the way, who first entered the tank on the day they died). Neither Victor nor Carlos got the training anyway. (One guy who sometimes cleaned the tank, I was told, was given a gauze mask (useless in my experience), held his breath and ran in and out of the tank to avoid the fumes.)
The trainer told the 33 workers who attended that they should read the (English language) Material Safety Data Sheets if they had questions about the chemicals and to wash if they got splashed. No one asked about the bad smells coming from the dilution tank. When rotten-egg smells got bad in the plant, people opened the windows; when the smells got worse – people were sent to clean the tank.
There were rotten egg smells all over the plant, I have been told by people who work there. That smell is the signature sign of hydrogen sulfide, an extremely poisonous gas. “Just a few breaths of air containing high levels of hydrogen sulfide gas can cause death†according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry [9]. What the ATSDR means by a high level is 500 parts per million. So far as I know, the only measure of hydrogen sulfide in the tank – made at the time of the attempt to rescue the workers, -- showed H2S levels as high as 800,000 per million. – 16,000 times an ordinarily fatal level.
I conclude from this that it is wrong to allow safety training that does not include a complete safety audit. Safety training needs to be tailored to actual hazards. Each work place requires different training. At North East Linen people needed training and supervision about chemical exposure in confined spaces. At the Solow Tower on East 66th Street, where Edger and Alciedes Moreno fell 47 storeys, people needed training and supervision about the dangers of falling from high places. One size does not fit all. This would require a change in Federal law and so awaits a less labor-hostile President and Congress.
Congressional Field Hearing A few weeks ago, members of the House Educational and Labor Sub-Committee on Workforce Protection held a hearing in the City Hall of Linden NJ. I was not what I expected. I’ve been to many such hearings and expect them to be media fests with political sound bites. Here by contrast, there was almost no coverage. Two or three local papers reported on the hearings: here [10] and here [11] and the Congress Members seemed very well briefed and focused.
Those who are devotees of the Subject of Occupational Safety and Health, can and should read the testimony at the Education & Labor Committee site [12].
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