NEWS & LETTERS, July-August 2010
Workshop Talks
Battleline over safety
by Htun Lin
One might think oil workers and healthcare workers don't have much in common. But we do. We all think a lot about the quality of our work. This is not about "professional pride" that management promotes with "employee of the month" type public relations campaigns. It has to do with safety, not just our personal safety but the health and welfare of everyone.
In 1996, we won a "quality-of-care" provision at the HMO where I work in a landmark California Nurses' Association labor contract. Since then, other unions began to get on the quality care bandwagon.
Challenges kept coming not only from management of HMOs but also from the California governor. Schwarzenegger tried to use the courts to reverse the nurse-to-patient safety ratios. But we healthcare workers stood our ground. Overall, fewer people have been killed or injured at the hands of HMOs over the years.
The workers at BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform were not so fortunate. According to one of the workers who survived the explosion, engineers concerned about safety wanted to slow down drilling in order to perform more tests.
They were overruled by a BP executive who was flown in by helicopter. He admonished the crew about cost over-runs. He lectured them that too much investment money would be lost if production did not meet investors' expectations. Therefore he demanded production be sped up. The day after he left, the rig exploded.
Since then, labor and environmental activists have exposed BP's long and sordid history of cutting corners on safety in order to increase production. An investigation panel was formed after a BP explosion at a Texas refinery, exposing long-term disputes over safety data between managers and front-line workers. The rig worker who testified about the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon reported the same disputes between workers and management over safety issues.
SPEEDUPS KILL
Ask any miner or healthcare worker. We experience daily what the oil rig worker was talking about. We all know speedups kill. After a long campaign exposing horror stories of patient deaths and injuries at the hands of our HMO, rank-and-file healthcare workers were able to put "quality" and safety language in the contract.
Since then, our struggle to maintain safety and quality standards continues against both the employer and our own sellout union leadership. They created labor-management forums which are supposed to handle issues of "mutual interest." These meetings focus on lecturing us on the importance of "reducing sick time" and "cutting costs."
When they discuss safety, their take on that issue is worlds apart from our focus. Their obsession is to lower the cost of workers' compensation when employees get injured on the job from trips, falls, etc. Hardly any time is spent on what we workers are concerned about.
SAFETY VS. BOTTOM LINE
The report on the BP Texas Refinery Explosion described a similar ongoing battle between managers, obsessed with ledgers, and workers concerned with safety on the shop floor.
This split in the labor process is the source of workers' alienation. There is a division between mental labor and manual labor. Each one is alienated from nature as well as their own labor. BP CEO Tony Hayward famously said "I want my life back." Don't we all? But that is impossible so long as capitalist conditions of labor persist. The disastrous consequences sadly have all been laid bare for all of us to see.
Workers' concerns with health, safety and welfare impinge on everyone our laboring activity touches, including the quality of life for the whole planet. No amount of monetary compensation can make up for the damage caused when workers are ignored. A Louisiana couple whose family ran a shrimping outfit for generations told me, "Our life is over. No amount of money can bring it back."
Crisis management has become capital's business-as-usual, as one crisis after another has become the rule. BP and HMO executives are satisfied with their fancy charts and ledgers, crafted in comfortable suites, looking only at cost and profit projections. They are in a world apart from our reality and life.
Our survival as a species as well as life on the planet depend on taking matters into our own hands. Any resolution short of that will keep all of us hostage to the current crisis-as-norm mode.
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