Recent Explosion Reveals Fatal Double Standard for Workers

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/77353/

By Les Leopold, Chelsea Green Publishing. Posted February 20, 2008.

As the recent explosion in the sugar factory shows, in industrial facilities, the drive for profits undermines safety.

Imagine the following scenario: A type of jet airliner explodes 281 times during a 12-year period, killing119 passengers and injuring 718 others. As a result, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommends new mandatory safety standards to halt these explosions, but that the airline industry and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stall the process, and rely instead on voluntary measures. Then, a year later another explosion demolishes the same style of airliner, killing another eight passengers and injuring at least 118 additional passengers and members of its crew.

A ludicrous scenario? Of course. The FAA and the airline industry would never allow that plane to fly. No one would be willing to fly it, or fly in it.

These devastating statistics, however, are real, but just not for airliners.

These statistics tell the tale of workers who confront combustible dust explosions in factories all across the nation -- a wide variety of dusts can ignite and explode if the conditions are right. These conditions are the probable cause of the explosion that tore apart the Imperial Sugar facility in Port Wentworth, Georgia on February 7, 2008.

Workers lucky enough to survive were seen running from the facility with burning skin hanging from their bodies. (There well may be more fatalities beyond the eight already reported.)

A year ago, the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) (a federal agency modeled after the NTSB) issued a report calling for mandatory regulations to prevent such explosions. But as of the Port Wentworth catastrophe, the board had not received a written response from the Bush administration's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) about what actions would be taken. The result of this laissez-affaire approach to regulation enabled the industry to police itself and we now see the fatal results.

FULL story at link.