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Tragedy for Workers Profits For The Rich: St. Mary's, 51 Die

By VVAW

TRAGEDY FOR WORKERS
PROFITS FOR THE RICH

When 51 construction workers were killed near St Mary's, West Virginia, it made headlines all over the country, but only because there were so many people involved in one such incident, not because death on the job is anything rare. According to the U.S. Public Health Service, during the early years of the 1970's, almost 3 workers per thousand were killed by or in what they call "Industrial accident," meaning on the job. In fact when 4 construction workers were killed earlier at this same construction site, the New York Times simply commented that this was "not unusually high a number" for this kind of work.

In the St Mary's disaster, a group of ironworkers, carpenters and electricians were working 170 feet in the air, pouring concrete for the 29th layer of a giant cooling tower. The scaffolding on which they were standing was attached to the 28th layer of concrete which they had poured the day before. Cold weather overnight had made the dangerous practice of using yesterday's concrete to fasten today's scaffolding even more dangerous. As one of the workers on the site said, "You can just stand and look at it, and it's supposed to have a glossy look if it's ready; but this stuff was gray. You could tell it weren't ready just by looking."

The concrete wasn't ready and 51 workers died. But much more is involved than a simple "miscalculation" about the hardness of the concrete on the part of some supervisor or foreman.

The cooling tower is part of a $677 million generating plant being built for the huge Allegheny Power Company. The construction firm of Research-Cottrell, Inc, of New Jersey, has the contract for building the tower itself. Beginning of construction on this tower was delayed this year because of bad weather, and began on the 1st of April. In most such contracts, there's a penalty clause for every day over an agreed upon deadline, with bonuses--for the company, not the workers--for every day ahead of schedule that the project is completed. One of the deadlines for the tower had recently been advanced by 30 days. As one of the workers, who watched the scaffolding collapse to the ground, later told reporters, "Ever since the weather cleared last month, they've just been pushing as hard as they could to get that tower done. And they didn't care if they had to cut safety corners to get the job done."

For hundreds of thousands of veterans, whether or not they're construction workers, the lesson is one which we learned the hard way. The bottom line for the bosses is profits. If that means they send us around the world to fight, get wounded, or die to keep their profits rolling in, well, that's fine with them. And if it means sending workers up 170 feet in the air on a scaffolding attached to wet concrete, well they don't give a damn about that either.

For years, workers have fought against unsafe conditions; in the face of determined struggle, owners have had to institute some safety reforms. The recent strike of coal miners, by far the longest in their long history of struggle against mine owners and operators, was in part aimed at safety, and particularly at the right to walk off the job when faced with unsafe conditions.

One of the concessions granted as a result of years of struggle was the governmental protection agency which is supposed to prevent accidents like that at St. Mary's--the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. But like most government "watchdog" agencies, OSHA knows where its interests lie--and that's not with the workers it is supposed to guard. In fact, OSHA's power is severely restricted both in what it can do by law and in the number of people it has to do the work ( a total of 1200 inspectors for the nation's 1.4 million work places). OSHA can levy fines; for "serious" violations, the average fine in 1976 was $544.94, hardly a major blow to the conglomerates who may be hit with these penalties. In a recent case so large as to be newsworthy, OSHA levied a fine of 447,400 for 21 violations at a Texas grain elevator where 18 workers were killed (and the company still has the "right" to appeal even that penalty).

It's not that OSHA didn't periodically oversee the operation near St Mary's. As the depth of the disaster there became more apparent, researchers started looking through their files. There they found a report, filed a year earlier, citing Research Cottrell, Inc, saying that there was no evidence that the scaffold atop the cooling towers met required weight-bearing safety tolerances or had a secondary escape route. Further, the scaffolding which had been shipped to the construction site two years earlier was badly in need of repairs then; what repairs were made were done without a qualified engineer. But, despite these reports, nothing was done. Complaints by workers on the job resulted in "non-serious" citations. And several workers at the construction site said they were afraid to tile complaints because of reprisals by the employers.

In 1976, a total of 970 construction workers died during the year; most of these made no more than the local obituary column. For a disaster like St. Mary's, the media cannot just pass it by, but even though the workers at the construction site were very clear on where the blame for the accident should be placed, the papers carried little of that. Instead, their focus was the "tragedy" and in particular, the tragedy of Lee Steele who lost four sons and six other relatives in the accident. Steele himself was clear on the situation. He told reporters that the Governor of West Virginia, Jay Rockefeller, had asked to attend the funeral: " I told him he wouldn't be welcome," Steele said.

Another worker summed up the lesson of the accident; "Workers in every industry need the right to strike over safety. As it is now, there's no other way to force them to treat you like human beings and not just another piece of equipment."

Based on what has happened in the past, there will be a lot of scurrying around for the next several months with various agencies trying to assign blame for the accident and the company denying any responsibility. Maybe the company will even find some supervisor or foreman to sacrifice saying "It was all his fault." There may even be a fine. But the accidents, which amount to murder, will go on, in the mines, on the construction sites, in the factories around the country. "All they care about's production, production, production," said one of the construction workers. And that's because production means profit and for the bosses, that's what it's all about.