SACRAMENTO, Calif.—Two Steelworkers locals and the BlueGreen Alliance scored a win in California when the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board rejected oil refiners’ looser safety plans.
The board’s unanimous vote on September 18 overturned an agreement between the refiners’ lobby, the Western States Petroleum Association, and state officials to bar union reps or other workers from participating in comprehensive safety reviews at Californian refineries and to weaken two other safety requirements.
Steelworkers Locals 5 and 675 and the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of unions and environmental groups, fought hard and successfully to have the board reverse the state’s pro-corporate decision.
The union’s oil sector represents tens of thousands of U.S. refinery workers.
The reviews, to implement Process Safety Management standards, mandate inspections of an entire refinery complex—pipes, tanks, ladders, superstructure, everything—top to bottom. The PSM standards also require refinery owners to fix any problems.
The board’s decision means the tougher safety standards will stay in place and the union and/or worker reps will still accompany the state safety inspectors and make PSM recommendations.
And that in turn will help protect workers and surrounding communities from refinery explosions, fires and accompanying dangers.
Process safety management, or lack of it, has long bedeviled the petroleum industry nationally. With few PSM inspections, refinery explosions occurred, killing workers and losing dangerous chemicals and gases into surrounding communities. At one point, the industry averaged an explosion a week, nationally, though not all were fatal.
A 2012 refinery explosion and fire at the Chevron plant in Richmond, Calif., injured 19 workers and forced the evacuation of 15,000 people for medical treatment after they inhaled hazardous smoke and gases. That led to California’s PSM standards in 2017, which the refiners tried to weaken.
An explosion and fire at the then-BP refinery near Galveston, Texas, killed several workers and led to mass evacuations. That probe, by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration—after the Steelworkers raised hell—also revealed that nationally PSM inspections at refineries were few and far between.
California mandated PSM inspections, plans, and their implementation, starting in 2017, including union/worker participation in inspections and recommendations.
The California petroleum refiners’ lobby wanted to eliminate the unionists and/or workers from the PSM walkarounds. The workers, more familiar with a refinery’s operations than any state OSHA inspector, are more likely to flag problems—and the companies, which don’t like spending money on safety, don’t like that.
During the USW presidency of the late Leo Gerard, the refiners’ refusal to even discuss PSM and other safety issues in national oil bargaining forced the Steelworkers’ petroleum sector members into a strike.
The petroleum lobby sued California a year after the state’s PSM mandate began. The agreement between state officials and the lobby was supposed to end the suit by weakening the requirement.
But the state’s safety board tossed that pact. The Steelworkers and the BlueGreen Alliance praised the reversal.
“Thanks to the hard work of USW members, environmental groups and California residents, the state’s PSM rules led the nation in keeping workers and communities safer and healthier,” said Mike Smith, who chairs the USW National Oil Bargaining Program.
“Quite simply, this agreement would have made workers and community residents less safe. Workers’ voices are essential to making our refineries safer, and we’re proud the board rejected this effort to silence them.”
“We’re proud to stand strong with the United Steelworkers, labor, environmental, and community leaders fighting to keep workers’ voices strong in the effort to prevent refinery fires and explosions,” said BlueGreen Alliance Senior State Policy Organizer Franki Gracey.
“We thank the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board for rejecting this settlement that would have weakened standards that protect the lives of workers and the communities around California’s refineries and urge the [state] Attorney General’s office to fight to keep the PSM strong.”
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