At USX, Safety Falls Victim to Productivity, Union Says
Michael York and Gus Lalios never had a chance.
Trapped by seeping argon gas as they finished a maintenance job at the bottom of one of the huge steel-making vessels at USX Corp.’s steel complex here, the two mill hands had no way to fight back as the invisible gas literally took their breath away.
Without emergency respirators, or even any backup workers watching from the top of the vessel to make sure they were all right, York and Lalios died quickly.
“It had to be a matter of 10 minutes before anybody found the first two men,” says Richard Kellems, a carpenter in the Gary mill who helped rescue other workers overcome when they went after York and Lalios in the vessel. “Nobody knew what was wrong, what was going on.”
The accident last March 31 that claimed both York and Lalios was perhaps the most dramatic example of what workers and union leaders charge has become a growing problem at Gary: that USX’s campaign to cut costs and improve productivity in its ailing steel operations in recent years has led to deteriorating safety conditions, mounting injuries--and even a few deaths--in its largest mill.
The union’s concerns about safety are vehemently rejected by USX officials, who not only insist that safety is a high priority at the firm, but also produce statistics--disputed by the union--that they say show that the Gary mill is among the safest in the business.
Higher Injury Rates
Even so, the allegations of worsening safety conditions at Gary and in the steel industry generally highlight a growing concern among safety experts, who worry that there may be hidden costs in industrial America’s campaign to regain its edge against foreign competition.
The push for higher levels of productivity in some of the country’s most depressed industries has been accompanied by higher injury rates in a wide range of manufacturing industries, such as steel making, meatpacking, machine tools and metal fabrication.
To improve productivity and cut costs, manufacturers have been reducing employment levels while maintaining relatively high rates of output. As a result, safety experts charge that many of those businesses are frequently reducing their labor costs by piling up extra duties on overburdened workers, who then get hurt as they try to keep up.
The effects of such production pressures on safety seem especially visible in the crisis-ridden steel industry, where injury rates have surged while employment has plunged.
Traditionally, injury rates in troubled industries such as steel go down during economic slumps, and rise during boom times, when new workers are hired. Instead, the opposite has happened, at least in part because companies have been cutting spending on safety-related programs and are also loading more and more work onto fewer and fewer employees.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that, at the nation’s blast furnaces and basic steel product operations, lost workdays due to injuries rose to 97.7 per 100 workers in 1985 from 77.7 in 1982 , while employment plunged to 304,900 from 394,300 during the same period. The total number of injury cases also rose to 10.5 per 100 workers in 1985 from 10.1 in 1982 .
Now, workers at Gary complain that they have been paying the price--in the form of mounting injuries--for the fact that USX, the nation’s largest steelmaker, has been under unremitting pressure to improve labor productivity.
Slashed Work Force
USX, formerly U.S. Steel, has responded to the pressure from imports here in Gary by enduring a six-month labor dispute, which ended Feb. 1, in order to extract lower wages and benefits from the United Steelworkers. (USX is just beginning to resume steel-making operations in the wake of the dispute and doesn’t expect to be back up to full production until later this year.)
But before the labor dispute began, USX was also slashing employment levels to reduce the amount of labor required to make each ton of steel.
In part, USX did so by reducing crew sizes in the Gary mill, and also by hiring cheaper outside contract workers to take over jobs previously handled by union members. As a result, membership in United Steelworkers Local 1014, the largest local union representing workers at the Gary mill, dropped to 3,600 from 9,800 between 1983 and 1986, according to Local President Larry Regan.
But union officials and workers here say that the crew size reductions led to worsening safety conditions before the walkout began, because employees were frequently forced to take on too many extra duties.
“I call it a hell hole, that’s what it is,” says Tom Stanton, a 45-year-old Gary worker hospitalized for an angina attack suffered on the job after he says that his three co-workers were laid off and he was required to take on many of their duties.
“All over that plant, people have been carrying too many jobs,” says Stanton.
Watched Injuries Jump
Regan and Willie Moore, safety chairman for Local 1014, note that USX maintained relatively high production levels before the labor dispute began; they argue that such high production rates at a time of drastic crew size reductions overburdened workers such as Stanton, placing them at greater risk of injury.
Buster Kinsler, a steel pourer at Gary, who says that his crew was cut from five to three last year, complains that he watched injuries surge at the mill.
“They just work the hell out of you,” says Kinsler. “We had more accidents last year than we had in the last 13 years.
“I put them in the ambulance myself,” adds Kinsler, who was burned last year while pouring molten steel. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Meanwhile, union leaders complain that USX has, over the last few years, reduced its funding for safety-related programs in order to slash costs, further increasing injuries at Gary and other mills. “They have absolutely cut back on money for maintenance and safety, and they’ve cut back the management staff devoted to safety and health,” says Mike Wright, safety director for the Steelworkers in Pittsburgh. “The safety departments have been decimated at all of the steel companies.”
USX Chairman David M. Roderick, however, denies that safety conditions have worsened at USX’s mills, adding that he doesn’t think it makes sense that lower employment levels could lead to more injuries.
“Maybe this is sort of using common sense, but you don’t hurt more people by having fewer and fewer to hurt,” says Roderick.
“We’ve gone from eight man-hours per ton (the amount of labor required to make one ton of steel) down to four in the last few years, and so there are just fewer people in there to get hurt to begin with,” Roderick noted. “So our frequency, our number of accidents, has continued to go down. Safety is of great concern to us, and if we all commit ourselves to safety first . . . the trend in the frequency of accidents will continue to go down.”
Lower Rates Reported
Roderick also stresses that USX is resuming steel-making operations slowly now that its labor dispute is over in order to insure safe working conditions for its employees.
George Keebler, a USX spokesman, also adds that the Gary mill has consistently reported injury rates well below the steel industry’s average. In 1986, Gary reported just 0.24 lost workdays per 200,000 hours worked, compared to an industry average of 2.32 per 200,000 hours, according to Keebler. He adds that injuries at Gary have been steadily declining in recent years; the 1986 rate at Gary was far below the 1.27 lost workday level the mill posted in 1981.
But Wright insists that he hasn’t seen any good measure of safety conditions at the Gary works because, “I don’t trust the (injury) numbers coming from the company.” Wright also acknowledges that the union doesn’t have any independent statistics to back up its charges that safety conditions have deteriorated at Gary. However, he charges that he still believes that USX had the worst safety conditions of any major company in the steel industry during the year before its labor dispute.
Moore, the union safety chairman at the mill, also charges that USX has not been accurately reporting injuries at Gary. He insists that many workers are told to remain at work even when they are slightly hurt, so that the mill will keep a low lost workday rate.
Indeed, USX has already been cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for willfully under-reporting injury statistics at its Clairton, Pa., plant. The agency has not filed similar charges at Gary, however; the federal OSHA has turned over workplace inspection responsibility in Indiana to a state agency.
USX denies that it has filed false injury reports at the Gary mill. “Our records have been reviewed many times by federal and Indiana officials,” responds Keebler. “Our statistics are accurate.”
Working Unfamiliar Jobs
The Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which has taken over plant inspections in the state from the federal OSHA, has no independent, publicly available records concerning injury rates at Gary, according to James Brown, IOSHA’s director of administration.
Meanwhile, workers and union officials complain that the layoffs that have resulted from lower manning levels at Gary led to hundreds of workers being transferred into new and unfamiliar jobs in the mill before the labor dispute, while maintenance and training lagged. Safety conditions declined as a result, they argue.
“We went to new electrical temperature control equipment on the line, a whole new system, and they gave us two days of training,” notes Gary worker Evan Kisela. “It’s all critical equipment. I was scared to death.”
Wright believes that inadequate maintenance and training programs, victims of cost-cutting efforts, led in part to the deaths of York and Lalios. Valves that could have kept the argon gas out of the steel vessel in which they were working had not been not locked, in part, Wright argues, because the procedures for relining the vessel had not been updated since the argon gas system had been added.
Also, the two men were not being observed by any other workers at the top of the vessel, in part, union officials say, because crew sizes have been reduced to the point where safety observers are often not available when workers are performing hazardous tasks. In the past, such spotters would have been routinely available and might have prevented the accident, union officials say.
Wright charges that the accident was a “direct result of the fact that they (USX) were running so thin on maintenance.”
Received Small Fine
Keebler of USX denies that such problems led to the accident, however. “This was a maintenance procedure, so I’m confused when the union says we were running thin on maintenance,” Keebler says. “And we have applicable procedures for handling gas.”
The Indiana OSHA fined USX $2,000 in connection with the deaths, both for conducting operations in a confined space without adequate safety procedures, and for not providing respirators to workers in the area, according to Brown of IOSHA.
Union officials also complain that the low-paid contract workers, who have taken over many union jobs at Gary as USX seeks to further slash its labor costs, have not received much safety training either, and put other workers at risk as a result.
“The outside contractors really affected safety at USX,” before the labor dispute, says Wright. “They were not always familiar with the rules, and were not always required to follow the rules that union members did. They often created hazards for our members.”
The union blames the Dec. 27, 1985, accidental death of James Hall, a union worker at Gary, on a contract worker who was not following normal safety guidelines. Hall was crushed by three tons of steel that fell off a gondola rail car being loaded by a contract worker, and the Steelworkers charge that the contractor violated plant safety rules by stacking the steel dangerously high.
IOSHA initially fined USX $800 in connection with Hall’s death, finding that USX maintained inadequate safety procedures. The fine and citation were later dismissed.
Won Safety Concession
Keebler of USX denies that contractors are not required to adhere to plant safety rules. “The contractors have a responsibility to operate safely,” says Keebler. “They are instructed that they must operate the job safely.”
Still, Wright notes that, during their contract talks, the union demanded and won an agreement from the company that management will make sure that contract workers adhere more closely to plant safety rules in the future. Wright also stresses that the international leadership of the Steelworkers believes that the new contract contains provisions that should improve safety conditions generally at USX.
But Moore, the safety chairman of Local 1014, believes that the new contract, which calls for the elimination of another 268 union jobs at Gary, will only make safety conditions worse.
“The company is still making production first and safety second,” charges Moore.
Some Gary mill hands agree.
“The workload tripled where I worked before the lockout,” adds Charles Gregory, who has worked at Gary for more than 27 years. “It’s much more unsafe. It’s a shame. Where’s the compassion, on a human scale, from the top executives? It’s gone.”
