Alabama leaders have long touted the jobs created by the state’s big auto manufacturers such as Mercedes, Honda and Hyundai. But a recent story in Bloomberg Businessweek reveals that employees at suppliers that make parts for those plants are faced with dangerous conditions and in a few cases death. WBHM’s Andrew Yeager spoke with investigative reporter Peter Waldman about the story.
The Highlights
The safety record of Alabama auto suppliers:
“Deaths [in Alabama] are fairly rare but they have occurred. On the risk of amputation, which is one of the most serious injuries one can receive short of death, it was in 2015 twice the risk of the auto parts industry nationally.”
What contributes to dangerous work conditions:
“The suppliers are forced to produce parts at rates that are entirely unrealistic for their plants and their workforce, and that pushes people to work very long hours and to cut safety corners and we see this again and again. As one person put it to me, it is just-in-time manufacturing on steroids.
“…Unions are a big part of this story. The right-to-work states in the South obviously have very, very, very few unions…The result of that is you don’t have the shop stewards on the floor holding the management accountable for the overwork, in terms of hours. You don’t have them enforcing safety rules. The UAW literally has safety experts that roam the floors looking for these issues.”
Federal regulators’ response:
“[An OSHA administrator] had gone to Seoul, South Korea in 2015 and warned the Kia and Hyundai executives specifically that they were pushing their auto parts manufacturers too hard and it was going to result in serious problems for workers. He was very explicit about that. He said to the folks in South Korea that Americans are not gonna want to buy your cars if they have the blood of American workers on them.”
Response from the auto manufacturers:
“When I asked Hyundai about it, I got a response from their spokesman Robert Burns that they do care about safety. They do try to keep their suppliers compliant with all OSHA regulations. He was saying that, you know, this is not an issue that they are indifferent to.”