This essay is reproduced here as it appeared in the print edition of the original Science for the People magazine. These web-formatted archives are preserved complete with typographical errors and available for reference and educational and activist use. Scanned PDFs of the back issues can be browsed by headline at the website for the 2014 SftP conference held at UMass-Amherst. For more information or to support the project, email sftp.publishing@gmail.com
XXX at Vinylex
by Dennis Brubaker
‘Science for the People’ Vol. 7, No. 5, September 1975, p. 33
The following article includes a critical discussion of a negative role played by representatives of the OCAW in organizing efforts at a small plastics factory in Tennessee. We wish to point out that the OCAW has been one of the more progressive U.S. unions, particularly in the area of occupational health. We hope the events described below are a result of a local situation and do not reflect a retrogressive tendency in OCAW’s international operations.
Introduction
In early 1975, when the OSHA inspector visited Vinylex Corporation in Karns, Tennessee, management panicked. The inspector was occupied in the front offices while crews of managers and workers tried to get the place in shape. Water was mopped up, floors swept clean of plastic compounds, products were restacked in the storage areas, and junk was removed after lying around for months. When the inspector came out he was guided by a cluster of management people, who directed his movements and conversations as much as possible. He appeared to look closely for obvious safety hazards—hazards which could exist in any factory—but conducted no open tests of air quality or of hazards related to specific jobs. Vinylex, with its brand-new physical plant, passed the test.
Conditions at Vinylex
Vinylex, a plastics factory which produces vinyl products made in extruders, is clearly a dangerous place to work: workers are burned by machines operating at 300 or 400 degrees F. and often receive injuries because of inadequate tooling. Since polyvinyl chloride (PVC) was not actually manufactured here, there were not large amounts of vinyl chloride (VC) around. (Vinyl chloride has been found to cause angiosarcoma, a very rare form of liver cancer, in exposed workers in PVC plants.) However, some VC may be formed by the decomposition of the PVC at the high temperatures of the extruders (my job was to operate one of these). Also, the powdered plastics (which had a distinct foul odor) and chemicals used at Vinylex often caused severe skin irritations and the fine dust could be inhaled.
Organizing Efforts and Problems
Occupational health and safety seemed to be an issue which could be organized around. We called in an organizer from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW), from nearby Oak Ridge, where he had been engaged in an attempt to organize professional scientists. He told us that he would supply literature on the health hazards and bring in one of the OCAW staff people to talk to us about health and safety. Neither ever materialized. He suggested that he and some of us (concerned workers) go around to visit and talk to the rest of the workers (there are about 200 employees). This would have been time consuming, since most workers lived in the surrounding countryside, quite far from the plant and from each other. Anyhow, it never happened either.
Workers that I spoke to rarely responded enthusiastically to health and safety issues, although many were more aware of the hazards than I. The typical response was: I know it’s dangerous, but I’ve got to work to feed my family, no matter what. This is a concern. which is impossible to refute. In times such as these, a worker will rarely quit his or her job because it is unsafe.
There were other organizing difficulties: Vinylex has a high turnover rate of production workers; few workers had been there more than five years—most who had lasted that long were in management or some supervisory position. Consequently, few workers had experienced long-term direct exposure to the chemicals we handled. Also, Vinylex had prior experience in keeping unions out of the plant. At the first stages of the organizing attempt, management people were actually nicer to the workers. Then later, the repression hit—a worker’s product quality was severely criticized if he was seen talking to anyone involved in the organizing.
Reasons for Failure
In the end our organizing campaign was a failure. Union assurances of job security were refuted when management won a test case against a worker who had been fired. Union credibility (which was low in this area at the outset) was destroyed when their claims of a victory in that test case were proven false. Tales of how a union voted in once before had failed to gain pay raises after long and costly strikes convinced many workers that the case was hopeless. Management scare tactics—ranging from letters from the president to overtly watching employees suspected as organizers—took their toll. There was never even a vote. One by one the ring leaders were converted or eliminated. By the time I was fired (for “misconduct”), the union was not even around to take the case to the labor board. Clearly, Vinylex was only of incidental interest to OCAW. But their failure has set back the causes of unionization and worker safety at that plant perhaps by years. The people who work there, meanwhile, can quit their jobs—if the employment situation ever improves—and perhaps go on to better things, after several years of possible exposure to VC.
Dennis Brubaker