Work Disasters Raise Concern

In Light of Deaths at Mines and Oil Rigs, North Dakotans Worry About Workplace Safety Close to Home






On April 5, 2010, the most devastating mining disaster in the last 40 years ensued in West Virgina. Twenty-nine miners lost their lives in an explosion in Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine.




Five workers were killed, two injured, in an explosion at a Tesoro refinery at Anacotes, Washington on April 2 and eleven are presumed dead after an explosion on an oil rig off of the Louisiana coast on April 21.




These incidents were not isolated. The Tesoro refinery chalked up 150 safety violations last year. Massey Energy has a history of unsafe behavior; the Upper Big Branch mine was not considered their most dangerous. Ten Massey mines with worse-than-average injury rates received 2,400 citations in 2009 and four of them had injury rates that doubled the national average. None of this impacts their productivity significantly as Massey Energy has a “lost-time incident rate” better than the national average.




These events are being highlighted by United Steelworkers who released a report this month accusing the oil refining industry of failing to learn from disasters such as the explosion in Texas City in 2007.




This is of particular interest to North Dakota’s booming oil industry. Keeping our workers safe will be difficult. In 2008, North Dakota was ranked 4th in state workplace fatality rates by the AFL-CIO. The only states with higher fatality rates were Wyoming, Alaska, and Montana. Last year, we had 12 recorded deaths in the workplace, which was an improvement.




“Government’s role is crucial.” is the opinion of Mark Froemke, president of the Northern Valley Labor Council in Grand Forks, “government is the only organization that can make sure, throughout this country, that safety regulation will be held in the highest regard. It is their job to see that people return home in the same condition they went to work in.”




“We need government to be involved to hold companies and corporations accountable.” agreed Ken Baker of Coalharbor North Dakota, who has worked as a heavy-equipment Operating Engineer for 35 years.




Ken went on to say, “I just came off of a job last year at one of the power plants, new construction, we had achieved just under 500,000 hours without a recordable injury. That’s awesome.” But he stressed the importance that it was a union job.




Wth a union contract, said Ken, “Workers have rights.” It’s the “typical difference” between a union and a nonunion job. If there is no union, it is “one man speaking alone against the management. That one person is easily gotten rid of.”




Not all companies need a union to maintain safety, “There are those that don’t and there are those that do.” said Tom Deutscher, Area Director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “Traditionally this is a non-union state.” But he stressed that “we have employers out there who are not really Mother Theresas. We have found that people do not take their safety and health responsibly, seriously, unless there’s a carrot dangling in front of them. Sometimes it’s enforcement, sometimes it’s not.”




Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship doesn’t want a union if and when their mine reopens in West Virginia.




“This guy, making $30-some million in 2005, went inside the coal mine and sat down with every single worker and said, ‘If you vote for the union, you’re not going to have a job because I will close this mine down,” said United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts.




In light of these and other recent tragedies, President Obama proclaimed April 28th Workers Memorial Day. In a speech on April 15, he declared, “We need to make sure that miners themselves,” said the President on April 15th, “and not just the government or mine operators, are empowered to report any safety violations.”