Inwards Alabama’s Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs
The South’s manufacturing renaissance comes with a mighty price.
Regina Elsea was a year old in one thousand nine hundred ninety seven when the very first vehicle spinned off the Mercedes-Benz assembly line near Tuscaloosa. That gleaming M-Class SUV was historic. Alabama, the nation’s fifth-poorest state, had wagered a quarter-billion dollars in tax violates and other public giveaways to land the very first major Mercedes factory outside Germany. Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai followed with Alabama plants of their own. Kia built a factory just over the border in West Point, Ga. The auto parts makers came next. By the time Elsea and her five siblings were teenagers, the country roads and old cotton fields around their home had come alive with 18-wheelers shuttling instruments and stamped metal among the car plants and 160 parts suppliers that had sprouted up across the state.
A good student, Elsea loved reading, horses, and dogs, especially her Florida cracker cur, named Cow. She dreamed of becoming a pediatrician. She enrolled in community college on a federal Pell Grant, with plans to transfer to Auburn University, about thirty miles from her home in Five Points. But she fell in love with a kindergarten sweetheart, who’d become a stocker at a local Walmart, and dropped out of school to make money so they could rent their own place.
Elsea went to work in February 2016 at Ajin USA in Cusseta, Ala., the same South Korean supplier of auto parts for Hyundai and Kia where her sister and stepdad worked. Her mother, Angel Ogle, warned her against it. She’d worked at two other parts suppliers in the area and found the tempo and pressure unbearable.
Elsea was twenty and not lightly deterred. “She thought she was rich when she brought home that very first paycheck,” Ogle says. Elsea and her bf got engaged. She worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, hoping to stir from makeshift status at Ajin to utter time, which would bring a raise from $8.75 an hour to $Ten.50. College can wait, she told her mom and stepdad.
On June Legitimate, Elsea was working the day shift when a computer flashed “Stud Fault” on Robot 23. Bolts often got stuck in that machine, which mounted poles for sideview mirrors onto dashboard frames. Elsea was at the adjacent workstation when the assembly line stopped. Her team called maintenance to clear the fault, but no one showcased up. A movie obtained by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration shows Elsea and three co-workers waiting impatiently. The team had a quota of four hundred twenty dashboard frames per shift but seldom made more than 350, says Amber Meadows, 23, who worked beside Elsea on the line. “We were always attempting to make our numbers so we could go home,” Meadows says. “Everybody was always tired.”
After several minutes, Elsea grabbed a contraption—on the movie it looks like a screwdriver—and entered the screened-off area around the robot to clear the fault herself. Whatever she did to Robot 23, it surged back to life, crushing Elsea against a steel dashboard framework and impaling her upper figure with a pair of welding tips. A co-worker hit the line’s emergency shut-off. Elsea was trapped in the machine—hunched over, eyes open, conscious but speechless.
No one knew how to make the robot release her. The team leader hopped 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 scarcely spoke English, toward the robot, requiring 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 eventually 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.
Alabama has been attempting on the nickname “Fresh Detroit.” Its burgeoning auto parts industry employs 26,000 workers, who last year earned $1.Trio billion in wages. Georgia and Mississippi have similar, however 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 challenge 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 brief. 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.
“The supply chain isn’t going just to Bangladesh. It’s going to Alabama and Georgia,” says David Michaels, who ran OSHA for the last seven years of the Obama administration. Safety at the Southern car factories themselves is generally good, he says. The situation is much worse at parts suppliers, where workers earn about 70¢ for every dollar earned by auto parts workers in Michigan, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Many plants in the North are unionized; only a few are in the South.)
Cordney Crutcher has known both environments. In two thousand thirteen he lost his left pinkie while operating a metal press at Matsu Alabama, a parts maker in Huntsville possessed by Matcor-Matsu Group Inc. of Brampton, Ont. Crutcher was leaving work for the day when a supervisor summoned him to substitute a slower worker on the line, because the plant had fallen 40 parts behind schedule for a shipment to Honda Motor Co. He’d already worked 12 hours, Crutcher says, and wished to go home, “but he said they truly needed me.” He was put on a press that had been acting up all day. It worked fine until he was Ten parts away from ending, and then a cast-iron crevice puncher failed to deploy. Crutcher didn’t realize it. All of a sudden the puncher fired and snapped on his finger. “I eyed my meat sticking out of the bottom of my glove,” he says.
Now Crutcher, 42, commutes an hour to the General Motors Co. assembly plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., where he’s a member of United Auto Workers. “They instruct you the right way,” he says. “They don’t throw you to the wolves.” His pay rose from $12 an hour at Matsu to $Legitimate.21 at GM.
In 2014, OSHA’s Atlanta office, after detecting a high number of safety violations at the region’s parts suppliers, launched a crackdown. The agency cited one year, 2010, when workers in Alabama parts plants had a 50 percent higher rate of illness and injury than the U.S. auto parts industry as a entire. That gap has narrowed, but the incidence of traumatic injuries in Alabama’s auto parts plants remains 9 percent higher than in Michigan’s and 8 percent higher than in Ohio’s. In two thousand fifteen the chances of losing a finger or limb in an Alabama parts factory was dual the amputation risk nationally for the industry, 65 percent higher than in Michigan and 33 percent above the rate in Ohio.
“I gave them a very strong message … ‘American consumers are not going to want to buy cars stained with the blood of American workers’ ”
Korean-owned plants, which make up harshly a quarter of parts suppliers in Alabama, have the most safety violations in the state, accounting for 36 percent of all infractions and 52 percent of total fines, from two thousand twelve to 2016. The U.S. is 2nd, with 23 percent of violations and seventeen percent of fines, and Germany is third, with 15 percent and eleven percent. But serious accidents occur in plants from all over, according to more than Three,000 pages of court documents and OSHA investigative files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Michaels, who was running OSHA when Elsea was killed, was furious when he learned how it happened. A year earlier, while attending a conference in Seoul, he’d paid a visit to executives at Hyundai Motor Co. and Kia Motors Co. to warn them that OSHA had found serious safety violations at many of their Korean-owned suppliers in the Southeast. Michaels told the carmakers they were squeezing their suppliers too hard. Their productivity requests were endangering lives, and they had to back off.
“I gave them a very strong message: ‘This brings shame on your reputation. American consumers are not going to want to buy cars stained with the blood of American workers,’ ” says Michaels, who in January rejoined the faculty of George Washington University. “They didn’t acknowledge the problem but said they were committed to safe working conditions. Clearly, they didn’t make safety a requirement for their suppliers.” Safety is a top priority at Hyundai’s Alabama operation, says spokesman Robert Burns, who added that Hyundai promotes safety at suppliers’ plants with quarterly forums and requires suppliers to serve with OSHA standards.
After Elsea’s death, Ajin issued a statement telling all employees were being retrained in safety procedures. “Ajin USA is deeply saddened by the tragic loss of Regina Elsea,” it said. A spokesman, Stephen Bradley, says the company can’t comment on the incident because of litigation. Elsea’s death “was a tragic accident, and Ajin remains deeply saddened,” the company said in a written statement. “Safety resumes to be our guiding principle.”
Ajin had lodged other OSHA violations a month before Elsea was killed. Eight workers had fingers crushed or fractured in latest years in welding machines. After the very first seven injuries, Ajin’s safety manager recommended installation of a machine controller called Soft Touch, which slows welding electrodes and stops them from closing together if a finger is detected. Nothing happened. Then an eighth worker smashed his thumb. For the unsafe welding machines, OSHA fined Ajin a total of $7,000.
In December, after investigating Elsea’s death, OSHA fined the company $Two.Five million for four “voluntary” citations, the agency’s most severe sanction, reserved for violators that “knowingly” disregard employee safety. Ajin is contesting the findings.
The pressure inwards parts plants is wreaking a different American carnage than the one Trump conjured up at his inauguration. OSHA records obtained by Bloomberg document searing skin, crushed limbs, dismembered figure parts, and a flailing fall into a vat of acid. The files read like Upton Sinclair, or even Dickens.
In 2015, 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. The plant’s maintenance chief told the OSHA investigator that he’d been too busy to write up decent lockout procedures for working on the system. The technician suffered third-degree burns all over his upper assets. Last year, OSHA levied a $145,000 fine (later negotiated down to $105,000) on the Japanese company, which supplies parts to Toyota Motor Co., for, among other infractions, a deliberate disturbance for knowingly exposing workers to unguarded radial presses.
Phyllis Taylor, 53, scorched her mitt inwards an industrial oven last year at the HP Pelzer Automotive Systems Inc. insulation plant in Thomson, Ga., while baking foam rubber linings for BMW rubber hoods. The oven had been down for repairs earlier that day, and “there was always pressure to catch up,” Taylor says. She slipped on a puddle of oil at her feet, and as she instinctively grabbed the oven in front of her, the door slammed down on her palm. She’d been telling her supervisor for weeks about the oil leak. “They don’t pay you no mind; they just want you to work,” says Taylor, who had skin graft surgery but still can’t close her superior palm. The plant’s maintenance manager told OSHA, “The concentrate of this plant is production at all costs.” OSHA fined HP Pelzer $705,000 for twelve “repeat” safety violations.
“You heard all day long, ‘If we don’t get these parts out, the customer is going to fine us $80,000’ ”
Nathaniel Walker, 26, had been doing the same high-wire act for three years at the factory of WKW-Erbsloeh Automotive, a supplier of metal trim parts to Mercedes and BMW, in Pell City, Ala. Every Saturday he climbed onto a ventilation duct above big dipping pools of acid on the plant’s back line, where the aluminum parts were anodized to give them a protective cover. It was always a race. At very first, Walker and a co-worker had 24 hours to clean and service as many of the thirty four tanks as possible. As production requests rose, management cut that to fourteen to 16 hours, and sometimes to as few as 6. The job required balance and dexterity. Walker and his colleague hopped on and off the Four½-foot-high ventilation shafts, hauling hoses, instruments, and 50-pound bags of caustic soda. They were always tired—Walker worked from Three p.m. to Three a.m., seven days a week, for up to six months straight.
There were no gangways, no cables, no handrails. The only training the workers got from the plant’s German supervisors, according to Walker, was in how to rinse off the ventilation ducts so they weren’t so slimy.
In July 2014, Walker fell in. He was balancing on the duct inbetween two tanks—one empty, one utter—while using a crowbar in the empty one to eliminate and substitute a lead cathode. His palms slipped, and he tumbled backward into a vat of sulfuric and phosphoric acid Four feet deep. Submerged, he swam for a 2nd before righting himself. A nearby co-worker quickly pulled him out and hosed him down, minimizing harm to his skin and eyes. Walker’s cotton T-shirt pulled off his skin like moist tissue paper. His mouth burned and swelled from gulping the solution. He spent four days in intensive care and didn’t fully recover for months.
OSHA fined WKW-Erbsloeh $178,000 and issued the company a voluntary disturbance for failing to secure the work areas around open chemical tanks. The agency had explored WKW-Erbsloeh eight times since two thousand nine and issued numerous citations after another worker’s arm was chewed up in a grinding machine and a third employee lost a thumb. Walker was earning $13 an hour when he fell into the acid. “I was way, way underpaid for working all the time in a risky situation like that,” he says.
Ray Trott, a retired U.S. Marine aircraft maintenance chief, worked for WKW-Erbsloeh as a production manager until 2015. He says the German managers didn’t seem to understand the American workers and were never pleased with what they got from them. “If you made 28,000 parts one day, the next day they’d want 29,000,” Trott says. “You heard all day long, ‘If we don’t get these parts out, the customer is going to fine us $80,000.’ ”
Reco Allen, 35, took a job at Matsu Alabama to get his life together. After pulling down out of high school, he’d worked shortly at McDonald’s, then sold marijuana for a living. When he turned 30, with three kids junior than six and his wifey working at Walmart, Allen determined dealing dope was no way to raise a family. “They’d see cars pulling up, hear people talking, and ask, ‘Daddy what are you doing? You ain’t got no job.’ I wished to better myself.”
He applied at Surge Staffing, a temp agency that was hiring workers for Matsu. Allen’s dad, who’d worked at the facility for a few weeks after a 30-year career making furniture at Steelcase Inc., told him to stay away—the Matsu plant was too dangerous. “Don’t let the monster eat you up,” he told his son.
Allen took a $9-an-hour job on the overnight shift as a janitor. He passed up higher-paying positions on the assembly line, because “the machines frightened him,” says Adam Wolfsberger, the former manager at Surge Staffing who hired Allen. The only training he received was where to find the mop and broom, Wolfsberger says.
He stood there for an hour, his skin searing inwards the heated press. When emergency crews ultimately liberated him, his right arm was severed at the wrist
On April Two, 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. Matsu was producing only 60 percent of its parts quota and could have been fined $20,000 by Honda for every minute its shortfall held up the company’s assembly line, according to a deposition by the plant’s general manager at the time, Robert Todd, in a workers’ compensation suit filed by Allen in state court in Huntsville.
Allen testified in the case that his only operating instructions came from a co-worker who told him: “Get these blanks out of the bin. You fountain them in the machine, and you make sure you get back.” Stepping back was essential, not only to avoid injury but to clear the vertical safety rafter, or light curtain, which is supposed to deactivate the machine if a worker is standing too close when an operator cycles it on.
At about Four a.m., Allen, wiry and five feet nine inches, was leaning inwards the machine with his arms extended upward, loading metal bolts. Abruptly the die, which stamps the metal parts, slammed onto his arms. “It felt like the entire world was coming down on me,” he says. The press operator hadn’t noticed him working inwards the machine, and Allen’s framework was so slight that the safety slat missed him.
He stood there for an hour, his skin searing inwards 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 ultimately liberated him, his left arm was “plane like a pancake,” Allen says, and parts of three fingers were gone. His right palm was severed at the wrist, fastened to his arm by a chunk of skin. A paramedic cradled the gloved forearm at Allen’s side all the way to the hospital. Surgeons liquidated it that morning and amputated the rest of his right forearm to avert gangrene several weeks later.
Matsu, it turned out, had known for years that Press Ten, where Allen was dragooned into working, was dangerous. Three years earlier a press operator on the plant’s safety committee reported a near miss on an identical machine after the light curtain failed to pick up a worker. The safety committee recommended fixes to the vertical rafter, but nothing was done, according to testimony in the court case. In two thousand twelve a worker on that same press had his mitt crushed. In response, Todd, the general manager, recommended installing horizontal slats to eliminate the blind spot in the vertical light curtains of both machines. It would have cost $6,000 to $7,000, Todd testified. John Carney, the company’s vice president for operations at the time, rejected the proposal. Instead, he told Todd to install a safety bar, for $150, Todd testified. It failed to protect Allen.
After Allen’s injury, Surge Staffing gathered its eighty or so Matsu workers for a meeting, says Wolfsberger, the former Surge manager. That’s when the agency learned the plant had provided no hands-on training, routinely ordered untrained temps to operate machines, sped up presses beyond manufacturers’ specifications, and permitted oil to leak onto the floor. “Upper management knew all that. They just looked the other way,” says Wolfsberger, who left Surge in two thousand fourteen and now manages a billiards salon. “They treated people like interchangeable parts.”
An administrative law judge with the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission approved a $103,000 fine against Matsu, ruling that Allen’s injuries resulted from its “conscious disregard or plain indifference” to his safety. Matcor-Matsu did not react to phone messages and emailed questions, nor did its attorney, John Coleman. After the commission’s two thousand fifteen decision, Coleman told the Birmingham News the judge was mistaken and that Allen was trained but didn’t go after the rules. Allen sued the company and reached a multimillion-dollar settlement out of court. He and his wifey purchased 15 acres and a big house with a fish pond near the Tennessee Sea, prepaid their kids’ college tuition, and bought a bright-green Buick Roadmaster. “I’d rather have my arm back any day,” Allen says.
Inwards Alabama’s Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs
Inwards Alabama’s Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs
The South’s manufacturing renaissance comes with a powerful price.
Regina Elsea was a year old in one thousand nine hundred ninety seven when the very first vehicle spinned off the Mercedes-Benz assembly line near Tuscaloosa. That gleaming M-Class SUV was historic. Alabama, the nation’s fifth-poorest state, had wagered a quarter-billion dollars in tax cracks and other public giveaways to land the very first major Mercedes factory outside Germany. Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai followed with Alabama plants of their own. Kia built a factory just over the border in West Point, Ga. The auto parts makers came next. By the time Elsea and her five siblings were teenagers, the country roads and old cotton fields around their home had come alive with 18-wheelers shuttling instruments and stamped metal among the car plants and 160 parts suppliers that had sprouted up across the state.
A good student, Elsea loved reading, horses, and dogs, especially her Florida cracker cur, named Cow. She dreamed of becoming a pediatrician. She enrolled in community college on a federal Pell Grant, with plans to transfer to Auburn University, about thirty miles from her home in Five Points. But she fell in love with a kindergarten sweetheart, who’d become a stocker at a local Walmart, and dropped out of school to make money so they could rent their own place.
Elsea went to work in February 2016 at Ajin USA in Cusseta, Ala., the same South Korean supplier of auto parts for Hyundai and Kia where her sister and stepdad worked. Her mother, Angel Ogle, warned her against it. She’d worked at two other parts suppliers in the area and found the rhythm and pressure unbearable.
Elsea was twenty and not lightly deterred. “She thought she was rich when she brought home that very first paycheck,” Ogle says. Elsea and her beau got engaged. She worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, hoping to stir from makeshift status at Ajin to total time, which would bring a raise from $8.75 an hour to $Ten.50. College can wait, she told her mom and stepdad.
On June Eighteen, Elsea was working the day shift when a computer flashed “Stud Fault” on Robot 23. Bolts often got stuck in that machine, which mounted poles for sideview mirrors onto dashboard frames. Elsea was at the adjacent workstation when the assembly line stopped. Her team called maintenance to clear the fault, but no one displayed up. A movie obtained by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration shows Elsea and three co-workers waiting impatiently. The team had a quota of four hundred twenty dashboard frames per shift but seldom made more than 350, says Amber Meadows, 23, who worked beside Elsea on the line. “We were always attempting to make our numbers so we could go home,” Meadows says. “Everybody was always tired.”
After several minutes, Elsea grabbed a device—on the movie it looks like a screwdriver—and entered the screened-off area around the robot to clear the fault herself. Whatever she did to Robot 23, it surged back to life, crushing Elsea against a steel dashboard framework and impaling her upper assets with a pair of welding tips. A co-worker hit the line’s emergency shut-off. Elsea was trapped in the machine—hunched over, eyes open, conscious but speechless.
No one knew how to make the robot release her. The team leader leaped 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 slightly spoke English, toward the robot, requesting 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 eventually 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.
Alabama has been attempting on the nickname “Fresh Detroit.” Its burgeoning auto parts industry employs 26,000 workers, who last year earned $1.Three billion in wages. Georgia and Mississippi have similar, tho’ 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 rival 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 brief. 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.
“The supply chain isn’t going just to Bangladesh. It’s going to Alabama and Georgia,” says David Michaels, who ran OSHA for the last seven years of the Obama administration. Safety at the Southern car factories themselves is generally good, he says. The situation is much worse at parts suppliers, where workers earn about 70¢ for every dollar earned by auto parts workers in Michigan, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Many plants in the North are unionized; only a few are in the South.)
Cordney Crutcher has known both environments. In two thousand thirteen he lost his left pinkie while operating a metal press at Matsu Alabama, a parts maker in Huntsville wielded by Matcor-Matsu Group Inc. of Brampton, Ont. Crutcher was leaving work for the day when a supervisor summoned him to substitute a slower worker on the line, because the plant had fallen 40 parts behind schedule for a shipment to Honda Motor Co. He’d already worked 12 hours, Crutcher says, and wished to go home, “but he said they indeed needed me.” He was put on a press that had been acting up all day. It worked fine until he was Ten parts away from ending, and then a cast-iron fuckhole puncher failed to deploy. Crutcher didn’t realize it. Abruptly the puncher fired and snapped on his finger. “I spotted my meat sticking out of the bottom of my glove,” he says.
Now Crutcher, 42, commutes an hour to the General Motors Co. assembly plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., where he’s a member of United Auto Workers. “They instruct you the right way,” he says. “They don’t throw you to the wolves.” His pay rose from $12 an hour at Matsu to $Legal.21 at GM.
In 2014, OSHA’s Atlanta office, after detecting a high number of safety violations at the region’s parts suppliers, launched a crackdown. The agency cited one year, 2010, when workers in Alabama parts plants had a 50 percent higher rate of illness and injury than the U.S. auto parts industry as a entire. That gap has narrowed, but the incidence of traumatic injuries in Alabama’s auto parts plants remains 9 percent higher than in Michigan’s and 8 percent higher than in Ohio’s. In two thousand fifteen the chances of losing a finger or limb in an Alabama parts factory was dual the amputation risk nationally for the industry, 65 percent higher than in Michigan and 33 percent above the rate in Ohio.
“I gave them a very strong message … ‘American consumers are not going to want to buy cars stained with the blood of American workers’ ”
Korean-owned plants, which make up harshly a quarter of parts suppliers in Alabama, have the most safety violations in the state, accounting for 36 percent of all infractions and 52 percent of total fines, from two thousand twelve to 2016. The U.S. is 2nd, with 23 percent of violations and seventeen percent of fines, and Germany is third, with 15 percent and eleven percent. But serious accidents occur in plants from all over, according to more than Trio,000 pages of court documents and OSHA investigative files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Michaels, who was running OSHA when Elsea was killed, was furious when he learned how it happened. A year earlier, while attending a conference in Seoul, he’d paid a visit to executives at Hyundai Motor Co. and Kia Motors Co. to warn them that OSHA had found serious safety violations at many of their Korean-owned suppliers in the Southeast. Michaels told the carmakers they were squeezing their suppliers too hard. Their productivity requests were endangering lives, and they had to back off.
“I gave them a very strong message: ‘This brings shame on your reputation. American consumers are not going to want to buy cars stained with the blood of American workers,’ ” says Michaels, who in January rejoined the faculty of George Washington University. “They didn’t acknowledge the problem but said they were committed to safe working conditions. Clearly, they didn’t make safety a requirement for their suppliers.” Safety is a top priority at Hyundai’s Alabama operation, says spokesman Robert Burns, who added that Hyundai promotes safety at suppliers’ plants with quarterly forums and requires suppliers to serve with OSHA standards.
After Elsea’s death, Ajin issued a statement telling all employees were being retrained in safety procedures. “Ajin USA is deeply saddened by the tragic loss of Regina Elsea,” it said. A spokesman, Stephen Bradley, says the company can’t comment on the incident because of litigation. Elsea’s death “was a tragic accident, and Ajin remains deeply saddened,” the company said in a written statement. “Safety resumes to be our guiding principle.”
Ajin had lodged other OSHA violations a month before Elsea was killed. Eight workers had fingers crushed or fractured in latest years in welding machines. After the very first seven injuries, Ajin’s safety manager recommended installation of a machine controller called Soft Touch, which slows welding electrodes and stops them from closing together if a finger is detected. Nothing happened. Then an eighth worker smashed his thumb. For the unsafe welding machines, OSHA fined Ajin a total of $7,000.
In December, after investigating Elsea’s death, OSHA fined the company $Two.Five million for four “voluntary” citations, the agency’s most severe sanction, reserved for violators that “knowingly” disregard employee safety. Ajin is contesting the findings.
The pressure inwards parts plants is wreaking a different American carnage than the one Trump conjured up at his inauguration. OSHA records obtained by Bloomberg document searing skin, crushed limbs, dismembered figure parts, and a flailing fall into a vat of acid. The files read like Upton Sinclair, or even Dickens.
In 2015, 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. The plant’s maintenance chief told the OSHA investigator that he’d been too busy to write up decent lockout procedures for working on the system. The technician suffered third-degree burns all over his upper bod. Last year, OSHA levied a $145,000 fine (later negotiated down to $105,000) on the Japanese company, which supplies parts to Toyota Motor Co., for, among other infractions, a voluntary disturbance for knowingly exposing workers to unguarded radial presses.
Phyllis Taylor, 53, scorched her palm inwards an industrial oven last year at the HP Pelzer Automotive Systems Inc. insulation plant in Thomson, Ga., while baking foam rubber linings for BMW spandex hoods. The oven had been down for repairs earlier that day, and “there was always pressure to catch up,” Taylor says. She slipped on a puddle of oil at her feet, and as she instinctively grabbed the oven in front of her, the door slammed down on her palm. She’d been telling her supervisor for weeks about the oil leak. “They don’t pay you no mind; they just want you to work,” says Taylor, who had skin graft surgery but still can’t close her superior mitt. The plant’s maintenance manager told OSHA, “The concentrate of this plant is production at all costs.” OSHA fined HP Pelzer $705,000 for twelve “repeat” safety violations.
“You heard all day long, ‘If we don’t get these parts out, the customer is going to fine us $80,000’ ”
Nathaniel Walker, 26, had been doing the same high-wire act for three years at the factory of WKW-Erbsloeh Automotive, a supplier of metal trim parts to Mercedes and BMW, in Pell City, Ala. Every Saturday he climbed onto a ventilation duct above big dipping pools of acid on the plant’s back line, where the aluminum parts were anodized to give them a protective decorate. It was always a race. At very first, Walker and a co-worker had 24 hours to clean and service as many of the thirty four tanks as possible. As production requests rose, management cut that to fourteen to 16 hours, and sometimes to as few as 6. The job required balance and dexterity. Walker and his colleague hopped on and off the Four½-foot-high ventilation shafts, hauling hoses, implements, and 50-pound bags of caustic soda. They were always fatigued—Walker worked from Three p.m. to Trio a.m., seven days a week, for up to six months straight.
There were no gangways, no cables, no handrails. The only training the workers got from the plant’s German supervisors, according to Walker, was in how to rinse off the ventilation ducts so they weren’t so slimy.
In July 2014, Walker fell in. He was balancing on the duct inbetween two tanks—one empty, one utter—while using a crowbar in the empty one to liquidate and substitute a lead cathode. His forearms slipped, and he tumbled backward into a vat of sulfuric and phosphoric acid Four feet deep. Submerged, he swam for a 2nd before righting himself. A nearby co-worker quickly pulled him out and hosed him down, minimizing harm to his skin and eyes. Walker’s cotton T-shirt pulled off his skin like moist tissue paper. His mouth burned and swelled from gulping the solution. He spent four days in intensive care and didn’t fully recover for months.
OSHA fined WKW-Erbsloeh $178,000 and issued the company a deliberate disturbance for failing to secure the work areas around open chemical tanks. The agency had probed WKW-Erbsloeh eight times since two thousand nine and issued numerous citations after another worker’s arm was chewed up in a grinding machine and a third employee lost a thumb. Walker was earning $13 an hour when he fell into the acid. “I was way, way underpaid for working all the time in a risky situation like that,” he says.
Ray Trott, a retired U.S. Marine aircraft maintenance chief, worked for WKW-Erbsloeh as a production manager until 2015. He says the German managers didn’t seem to understand the American workers and were never sated with what they got from them. “If you made 28,000 parts one day, the next day they’d want 29,000,” Trott says. “You heard all day long, ‘If we don’t get these parts out, the customer is going to fine us $80,000.’ ”
Reco Allen, 35, took a job at Matsu Alabama to get his life together. After ripping off out of high school, he’d worked shortly at McDonald’s, then sold marijuana for a living. When he turned 30, with three kids junior than six and his wifey working at Walmart, Allen determined dealing dope was no way to raise a family. “They’d see cars pulling up, hear people talking, and ask, ‘Daddy what are you doing? You ain’t got no job.’ I dreamed to better myself.”
He applied at Surge Staffing, a temp agency that was hiring workers for Matsu. Allen’s dad, who’d worked at the facility for a few weeks after a 30-year career making furniture at Steelcase Inc., told him to stay away—the Matsu plant was too dangerous. “Don’t let the monster eat you up,” he told his son.
Allen took a $9-an-hour job on the overnight shift as a janitor. He passed up higher-paying positions on the assembly line, because “the machines panicked him,” says Adam Wolfsberger, the former manager at Surge Staffing who hired Allen. The only training he received was where to find the mop and broom, Wolfsberger says.
He stood there for an hour, his skin searing inwards the heated press. When emergency crews ultimately liberated him, his right forearm was severed at the wrist
On April Two, 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. Matsu was producing only 60 percent of its parts quota and could have been fined $20,000 by Honda for every minute its shortfall held up the company’s assembly line, according to a deposition by the plant’s general manager at the time, Robert Todd, in a workers’ compensation suit filed by Allen in state court in Huntsville.
Allen testified in the case that his only operating instructions came from a co-worker who told him: “Get these blanks out of the bin. You blast them in the machine, and you make sure you get back.” Stepping back was essential, not only to avoid injury but to clear the vertical safety plank, or light curtain, which is supposed to deactivate the machine if a worker is standing too close when an operator cycles it on.
At about Four a.m., Allen, wiry and five feet nine inches, was leaning inwards the machine with his arms extended upward, loading metal bolts. Abruptly the die, which stamps the metal parts, slammed onto his arms. “It felt like the entire world was coming down on me,” he says. The press operator hadn’t noticed him working inwards the machine, and Allen’s framework was so slight that the safety rafter missed him.
He stood there for an hour, his skin searing inwards 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 eventually liberated him, his left palm was “plane like a pancake,” Allen says, and parts of three fingers were gone. His right mitt was severed at the wrist, linked to his arm by a chunk of skin. A paramedic cradled the gloved mitt at Allen’s side all the way to the hospital. Surgeons eliminated it that morning and amputated the rest of his right forearm to avert gangrene several weeks later.
Matsu, it turned out, had known for years that Press Ten, where Allen was dragooned into working, was dangerous. Three years earlier a press operator on the plant’s safety committee reported a near miss on an identical machine after the light curtain failed to pick up a worker. The safety committee recommended fixes to the vertical plank, but nothing was done, according to testimony in the court case. In two thousand twelve a worker on that same press had his arm crushed. In response, Todd, the general manager, recommended installing horizontal rafters to eliminate the blind spot in the vertical light curtains of both machines. It would have cost $6,000 to $7,000, Todd testified. John Carney, the company’s vice president for operations at the time, rejected the proposal. Instead, he told Todd to install a safety bar, for $150, Todd testified. It failed to protect Allen.
After Allen’s injury, Surge Staffing gathered its eighty or so Matsu workers for a meeting, says Wolfsberger, the former Surge manager. That’s when the agency learned the plant had provided no hands-on training, routinely ordered untrained temps to operate machines, sped up presses beyond manufacturers’ specifications, and permitted oil to leak onto the floor. “Upper management knew all that. They just looked the other way,” says Wolfsberger, who left Surge in two thousand fourteen and now manages a billiards salon. “They treated people like interchangeable parts.”
An administrative law judge with the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission approved a $103,000 fine against Matsu, ruling that Allen’s injuries resulted from its “conscious disregard or plain indifference” to his safety. Matcor-Matsu did not react to phone messages and emailed questions, nor did its attorney, John Coleman. After the commission’s two thousand fifteen decision, Coleman told the Birmingham News the judge was mistaken and that Allen was trained but didn’t go after the rules. Allen sued the company and reached a multimillion-dollar settlement out of court. He and his wifey purchased 15 acres and a big house with a fish pond near the Tennessee Sea, prepaid their kids’ college tuition, and bought a bright-green Buick Roadmaster. “I’d rather have my arm back any day,” Allen says.