Great post K&R! Mike's follow up to his story

[Omaha Steve]

Mike's follow up email. I have permission to post this in it's entirety!


Spoke with officials on the ground in Illinois earlier today. This is a breaking story.

When I originally wrote about Honeywell CEO David Cote threatening the safety of a small town by bringing in under-trained "scabs" (replacement workers )to run a uranium enrichment facility in Metropolis, IL, some contacted me saying they doubted the safety concerns I cited were as serious. The plant is currently being operated on a skeleton crew of managers and hired scabs who are indeed under-trained.

The Metropolis facility is the only conversion facility in the world that can distill uranium. While the scab workers Honeywell brought in from Louisiana have worked in nuclear facilities, they haven't worked on the process that converts uranium from the somewhat toxic UF4 solid state to the extraordinarily more lethal liquid UF6. For the process of converting uranium to UF6, Honeywell is hoping to use its managers who used to work on these processes years ago. In addition to not having worked these jobs in years and, as a result, being generally unfamiliar with them, the managers are liable to be especially unprepared to deal with the conversion plant's control system, which has been altered dramatically in the last few years.

Currently, the workers running the plant are unfamiliar with the system they are using and unfamiliar with the processes. This is a uranium enrichment facility from which even the slightest leak of UF6 could wipe out the entire town.

For this reason, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has not allowed the plant to resume production of UF6. Honeywell is currently using all the political connections it can to force the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to re-open it.


Honeywell originally said they would start up production of the deadly UF6 on Wednesday, however, Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors would not allow it. The Nuclear Regulatory Inspectors would not allow it because on August 25th a round of urine tests on workers showed an unusually high amount of uranium in workers' urine. The workers were not permitted to return to working with the uranium.

Since uranium sometimes builds up in the blood stream of workers working around it for years, the high levels of uranium in the workers' urine was not, in itself, unusual. None of the workers who was tested, however, had ever been tested for high levels of uranium, which meant they had been contaminated with the uranium since the last round of testing earlier this summer. More shockingly, one of the inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had unusually high levels of uranium in his urine tests.

CEO David Cote, a member of the President's deficit commission, is directly responsible for the safety hazards occurring under his watch at the Metropolis facility.

Degrading safety under the leadership of Honeywell CEO David Cote has been a top concern of workers over the last few years. Under the management of David Cote, the TOP safety programs of union-management safety committee have been disbanded. Under the TOP system, each incident was investigated jointly by a full-time union representative and a full-time company representative, who each filed an independent report on the matter. Because the union's workers would suffer the most from toxic uranium exposure, it had the biggest incentive to make sure the plant was safe, and thus, often wrote tougher reports than the company. For this reason TOP was disbanded.

In place of TOP, Honeywell implemented its own profit-centered program of behavioral safety, without the workers' input. If there was a problem or a leak, a worker was deemed responsible and disciplined for that problem even if it occurred because of aging equipment. If a worker reported a problem in their section, he was often cited for misconduct and liable to be fired. One worker who reported a routine problem was fired after 30 years of experience and no prior record of safety violations. The threat of firing workers for reporting safety problems actually creates a disincentive for workers to report problems.

Workers claim that Honeywell CEO David Cote is far more interested in keeping his record profits high than actually protecting workers and the surrounding community. During contract negotiations, Cote has proven this by risking nuclear fallout in order to demand that uranium workers agree to cut their retiree health care and pension plans.

That is why today, the 350,000 members of the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees called on President Obama to fire Honeywell CEO David Cote from the so-called Deficit Commission. They said:

Mr. Cote's cruel and calculated behavior towards workers at its hexafluoride plant in Metropolis, Ill. clearly illustrates that he's unqualified and inappropriate to help decide issues such as whether to reduce the federal deficit by cutting programs like social security or by upgrading the faulty military contracting process, from which Honeywell benefits.


Mr. Cote should be evicted from the so-called Deficit Commission immediately before he can use that position to harm all Americans the way he is injuring Honeywell workers in Illinois.

Since Honeywell CEO David Cote is one of President Obama's personal appointments to the Deficit Commission, it falls upon the President to decide whether or not a man of Cote's character should be deciding the fate of Social Security.



--
Mike Elk

[Bobbieo]

1. I have come to the conclusion that uranium In Any Form is a danger

to human health and well being. When will we learn!!!!

[mdmc]

3. ..

[sabrina 1]

2. He and Simpson should both be removed from the Commission.

If he really did this, I think the word for him is insane.