Re McWanes

[Otto]

It's a long piece but really worth it:

Family's Profits, Wrung From Blood and Sweat
By DAVID BARSTOW and LOWELL BERGMAN
"The untold story of how a reclusive family ascended into the ranks of the
nation's wealthiest industrial dynasties is an often-painful one, written in
the blood and tears of the very blue-collar workers celebrated by the Vulcan
statue.
(...)
the patriarch's dictum: time equals pipe, and pipe equals money.

For a McWane manager, they said, taking time for a safety or environmental
problem holds few attractions. It means slowing production to fix equipment.
It means more safety training, less time to make pipe. Indeed, police
records show that at one McWane plant in Alabama, supervisors refused to
wait a few hours for federal safety inspectors to arrive before restarting a
conveyor belt that had crushed a man to death.
(...)
Several current and former managers at other plants, though, said they had
techniques to manipulate injury totals.
"Once you have numbers, you have fines, you have attention and you have
inspections," a former senior safety manager said.
(...)
"I'd go to the hospital and get guys out of bed or a wheelchair to avoid a
lost-time incident." Even if the worker sat in an office all day, he
explained, McWane could still claim that his injury had not required him to
miss work."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/09/national/09PIPE.html?pagewanted=all



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