The following article was featured in the Fall 2024 issue of USW@Work.
Before Christopher Burks and his 325 co-workers at Kumho Tire in Macon, Ga., ratified their first contract in August 2023, they had little recourse to address their concerns about health and safety on the job.
Now, after a six-year fight against long odds to join the USW, the members of Local 9008 are working under their first union contract, with health and safety language covering training, a workplace safety committee, incident investigations and other important provisions to prevent recurrence.
“It was such a long battle. It was a hard fight,” Burks said. “In our first contract, we didn’t get everything we wanted, but we are better than we were before we started, and we are going to continue to grow.”
Not long after that first contract took effect at Kumho, in April 2024, 57-year-old worker Steven Brookins was killed in a tragic workplace incident. If not for the USW contract there, members might not have been able to fully participate in the investigation and aftermath of that incident.
Founding Principle
It is that work – fighting for workers’ safety and health – that is the bedrock principle of union membership, International President David McCall said in August in his address to almost 1,700 members and guests at the USW Health, Safety and Environment Conference in Pittsburgh.
“Health and safety is the foundation of the labor movement,” McCall said, emphasizing the importance of steadfast solidarity when it comes to safety. “No matter what the issues are, it’s about workers. It takes every one of us to make things better.”
McCall spoke on the conference’s opening day, just after hosting meetings with acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Julie Su, along with Burks and other new USW members from Kumho Tire and Blue Bird bus company in Fort Valley, Ga.
Su congratulated the workers on their victories and made the case that having a union to fight for worker protections is the most basic aspect of a good job.
“No job should be a death sentence,” Su said. “Every worker should know that they’re going to come home healthy and safe at the end of their work shift.”
Protecting Workers
Organizing more workers into the union, as USW members have done at Kumho, Blue Bird, the University of Pittsburgh and elsewhere in recent years, is the best way to protect workers, she said.
“It happened because you organized, and it happened because you acted in solidarity,” Su said of the recent surge in union activism. “It also happened because leadership matters. Together, we are ushering in a new era of a pro-worker, pro-union America.”
Ted Campiso, Rapid Response and safety representative for Local 13-447 in Westwego, La., said that making sure workers are safer on the job is not just a union issue – it also is a political one.
“We have to have the right legislation,” Campiso said. “Elections have consequences, and bad things can happen very quickly.”
In his address, McCall noted a number of the positive consequences of the Biden-Harris administration’s election in 2020, including new rules limiting worker exposure to silica dust, ensuring safe staffing in nursing facilities, and expanding the rights of workers to participate in incident investigations.
Workers across the country made all of those gains thanks to the activism of USW members, McCall said.
“We’ve weathered a lot of rough times, but we now have leaders who listen to what our issues are and are sincere about helping us with those problems,” he said. “It’s good to have so many friends who have our backs.”
Heat Standard
Another victory for worker safety could be on the way in the form of a standard protecting workers from the effects of extreme heat, said James Frederick, a former USW health and safety representative now serving as deputy assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Frederick spoke to members at the conference about the progress his agency has made since January 2021.
The heat standard, which the Biden administration proposed this summer and which is currently in the review process, would cover 36 million workers in both indoor and outdoor workplaces, he said.
Joining Frederick in addressing the conference was Steve Owens, chair of the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) along with other health and safety regulators.
Refinery Tragedy
Owens and Frederick led a discussion of the importance of thorough incident investigations, focusing on the tragic loss of two USW members and brothers, Ben and Max Morrissey of Local 1-346, in September 2022 at the BP-Husky oil refinery in Oregon, Ohio.
The CSB investigation of that tragedy found a series of failures on the part of refinery management and led the agency to issue seven recommendations to refinery operators, and others, to prevent future tragedies by addressing the safety gaps that led to the fire.
“Nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong during this incident,” Owens said. “The tragic loss of life resulting from this fire underscores the importance of putting in place the tools that employees need to perform tasks safely.”
Making sure workers have those tools requires support from the USW, employers, and securing those commitments is one of the most important jobs of a union-management health and safety committee, said USW Health, Safety and Environment Director Steve Sallman.
“We are here to do everything we can to prevent this from happening again,” he said.
Training and Education
For USW members, the work of preventing such fatal and life-altering incidents on the job takes on many forms, including investigating, training workers, inspecting work sites, identifying and eliminating potential hazards, and communicating with members and management about issues of concern.
To help members do that work, the weeklong conference provided 303 workshops covering topics such as incident investigation, fatigue, active shooter, whistleblower protections, ergonomics, workplace stress, chemical safety, fall protection, industrial hygiene, cancer in the workplace, reducing toxic exposures, safe patient handling for health care workers, and the first-ever industry/sector breakout meetings.
Elaine Stewart, a personal support worker at Cogir and member of Local 8300, said the conference gave her a chance to learn how her fellow health care workers are addressing their on-the-job issues.
“I leave knowing other people are going through the same issues of short staffing and workplace violence that we are,” she said. “I know that we can help each other and work together to solve these issues.”
Help for Members
Campiso said the health, safety and environment conference is one of the most important events for USW members to attend, because it arms local union leaders with the tools and the knowledge they need to make their workplaces safer.
“Our union has so many resources, and members need to know about them,” he said.
Those resources include assistance with incident investigations, training and education through the USW’s grant-funded Tony Mazzocchi Center, and help in the aftermath of tragic events through the union’s Emergency Response Team (ERT).
The ERT provides members and families with immediate aid, counseling, help in investigating root causes of accidents, as well as assistance with legal, financial and other needs.
ERT Director Duronda Pope, formerly a member of Local 8031 in Denver, said that even though the work of ERT coordinators can be extremely difficult and stressful, it also can be the most rewarding work union members do. The ERT currently has 62 team members across the United States and Canada.
“We advocate for people during the worst time in their lives,” Pope said. “Looking after each other is key, because we are our brother’s and sister’s keeper.”
The conference’s second day began with a solemn reminder of why that work is so critical. The conference hall fell silent as video screens displayed the traditional memorial scroll with the names of workers who had their lives taken from them at USW-represented workplaces since the union’s last health, safety and environment conference in April 2023.
That memorial, McCall said, is the most important part of the event.
“It really is a stark reminder that our work is never done,” McCall said. “We don’t know how many lives we’ve saved. There’s no way to measure it, but it’s work that can never stop, and we can never quit.”