Labor & Employment Law

Oil Rig Blast Renews USW Call for Tougher Safety Regs

By Mike Hall

The United Steelworkers (USW) again called for an overhaul of health and safety within the oil industry following the explosion yesterday on an oil drilling rig about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the fourth oil industry incident in a little more than two weeks that has killed or seriously injured workers.

The blast occurred just a week before Workers Memorial Day, which honors workers killed or injured on the job and also highlights the need for tough and effective workplace safety laws.

According to the latest reports, 11 oil rig workers remain missing, 17 were injured and air-lifted to hospitals and four remain in critical condition. The other 126 workers who were onboard the Transocean Ltd. oil platform escaped safely. The rig, about twice the size of a football field, sank this afternoon.

USW Vice President Gary Beevers, who heads the union’s oil sector, says, “While this is a dangerous industry,”

there are too many workers losing their lives. How many more workers have to pay the price for the industry’s lack of a safety culture? The industry is long overdue for a complete overhaul of its health and safety provisions.

On April 2, six workers were killed, including five USW members, in an explosion and fire at Tesoro’s Anacortes, Wash., refinery. On April 14, three workers were injured, two seriously, in a fire at ExxonMobil’s Baton Rouge, La., refinery. One worker was killed April 19 in a crane incident on the Motiva Enterprises expansion project in Port Arthur, Texas.

In a recent blog post, USW President Leo W. Gerard called for stronger workplace health and safety laws with tougher enforcement. Gerard wrote that both the Tesoro refinery and the Massey Energy Co.’s Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, where 29 coal miners were killed in an April 5 explosion, had long and troubling records of safety violations.

America must introduce new factors into that computation to protect the lives and limbs of workers who produce the energy on which this country depends. One factor is larger safety violation penalties?fines and shutdowns costly enough to outstrip profitability.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on April 22, 2010 (boomark / email).