Bloomberg News has an excellent article regarding the South’s auto manufacturing boom:
Inside Alabama’s Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs.
The South’s manufacturing renaissance comes with a heavy price.
The best quote of many from the article is this:
The pressure inside parts plants is wreaking a different American carnage than the one Trump conjured up at his inauguration. OSHA records obtained by Bloomberg document burning flesh, crushed limbs, dismembered body parts, and a flailing fall into a vat of acid. The files read like Upton Sinclair, or even Dickens.
And they back it up with example after example.
Bloomberg: Inside Alabama’s Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs
The article is relatively long and I suggest you read it in its entirety. It starts with the story of a woman killed because no one had any safety training.
No one knew how to make the robot release her. The team leader jumped on a forklift and raced across the factory floor to the break room, where he grabbed a maintenance man and drove him back on his lap. The technician, from a different part of the plant, had no idea what to do. Tempers erupted as Elsea’s co-workers shoved the frightened man, who was Korean and barely spoke English, toward the robot, demanding he make it retract. He fought them off and ran away, Meadows says. When emergency crews arrived several minutes later, Elsea was still stuck. The rescue workers finally did what Elsea had failed to do: locked out the machine’s emergency power switch so it couldn’t reenergize again—a basic precaution that all factory workers are supposed to take before troubleshooting any industrial robot. Ajin, according to OSHA, had never given the workers their own safety locks and training on how to use them, as required by federal law. Ajin is contesting that finding.
An ambulance took Elsea to a nearby hospital; from there she was flown by helicopter to a trauma center in Birmingham. She died the next day. Her mom still hasn’t heard a word from Ajin’s owners or senior executives. They sent a single artificial flower to her funeral.
snip
In December, after investigating Elsea’s death, OSHA fined the company $2.5 million for four “willful” citations, the agency’s most severe sanction, reserved for violators that “knowingly” disregard employee safety. Ajin is contesting the findings.
Bloomberg: Inside Alabama’s Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs
That was Obama’s OSHA.
Alabama has several auto manufacturing plants, but the biggest problem is with suppliers. These are non-union places. The race to the bottom kills while others profit.
Alabama has been trying on the nickname “New Detroit.” Its burgeoning auto parts industry employs 26,000 workers, who last year earned $1.3 billion in wages. Georgia and Mississippi have similar, though smaller, auto parts sectors. This factory growth, after the long, painful demise of the region’s textile industry, would seem to be just the kind of manufacturing renaissance President Donald Trump and his supporters are looking for.
Except that it also epitomizes the global economy’s race to the bottom. Parts suppliers in the American South compete for low-margin orders against suppliers in Mexico and Asia. They promise delivery schedules they can’t possibly meet and face ruinous penalties if they fall short. Employees work ungodly hours, six or seven days a week, for months on end. Pay is low, turnover is high, training is scant, and safety is an afterthought, usually after someone is badly hurt. Many of the same woes that typify work conditions at contract manufacturers across Asia now bedevil parts plants in the South.
Bloomberg: Inside Alabama’s Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs
Here are just a couple examples:
Last year a 33-year-old maintenance worker was engulfed in flames at Nakanishi Manufacturing Corp.’s bearing plant in Winterville, Ga.—after four previous fires in the factory’s dust-collection system. OSHA levied a $145,000 fine on the Japanese company, which supplies parts to Toyota Motor Co., for a willful violation for knowingly exposing workers to unguarded machinery.
snip
On April 2, 2013, after Allen had been on the job for about six weeks, a plant supervisor ordered him to put down his broom. He assigned him to work the rest of the shift on one of the metal-stamping presses instead and admonished him not to tell anyone about the job switch.
snip
He stood there for an hour, his flesh burning inside the heated press. Someone brought a fan to cool him off. “I was just talking to myself about what my daddy had told me,” Allen says. When emergency crews finally freed him, his left hand was “flat like a pancake,” Allen says, and parts of three fingers were gone. His right hand was severed at the wrist, attached to his arm by a piece of skin. A paramedic cradled the gloved hand at Allen’s side all the way to the hospital. Surgeons removed it that morning and amputated the rest of his right forearm to avert gangrene several weeks later.
Bloomberg: Inside Alabama’s Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs
2017, but like Upton Sinclair, or even Dickens.
But investors can drink champagne and light cigars while people die.