Union busting is going on all across the nation and Honeywell has engaged in an employee lockout believed to be in retaliation against a whistleblower who notified authorities of toxic radioactive mud leaking into the Ohio River when the company failed to do anything to clean it up.
…major U.S. weapons manufacturer, Honeywell, pled guilty last month to illegally storing hazardous radioactive waste without a permit. The company kept highly radioactive mud in drums in the open air behind its uranium enrichment plant in Metropolis, Illinois. According to a former Honeywell environmental safety officer, the toxic waste leaked into the Ohio River, which runs next to the plant.
Workers at the facility say they notified Honeywell of the problem on many occasions. Many are members of the United Steelworkers union and feel this particular incident led to the company’s desire to bust their union. More than 200 workers at the Metropolis plant have been out of work since last June due to stalled contract negotiations with the company on workplace safety, economic and seniority issues. Dozens of workers protested at the Honeywell shareholder meeting on Monday. Honeywell did not return a call from Democracy Now!, but it released a statement that its, quote, “goal remains to reach a fair and equitable settlement with the union.”
During the company’s attempt to bust the union it has brought in replacement workers and union organizer, Mike Elk reports potentially fatal accidents involving poisonous UF6 gas have occurred.
…the company brought in scabs, replacement workers, from a group called the Shaw Group. Now, the Shaw Group has a long history of covering up nuclear—you know, problems at nuclear facilities. They were fined $6.2 million by the federal government in 2009 for forcing its workers not to report safety problems at nuclear facilities in Alabama and Tennessee.
Since then, they’ve come in—there’s been many accidents. In August, there was an explosion at the plant, when hydrogen and fluoride gas combined. It blew off two of the scrubbers at the plant and forced the plant to shut down for several days. I talked with the state police at the time, and they said they had never heard such a loud explosion come from this plant, in decades.
In September, I found a report from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that showed that Honeywell cheated on the test, the safety test, the qualification test for the scab workers that replaced the locked-out workers. One of these—you know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission claimed that Honeywell corrected the problem; however, in September, one of the workers, who was not following procedure, damaged a safety valve on a container of UF6 gas. Now, UF6 gas is highly toxic. A couple puffs of it, and you’re dead. By not following procedure, he damaged a safety valve, and it released some traces of UF6 gas into the plant. Now, had that safety valve failed completely—there was 10,000 pounds of UF6 gas in that canister, and had that been released, it would have killed everybody within a six-mile radius of the facility in Metropolis, Illinois.
So the workers—and as well, in December, there was a release of HF gas, where alarms went off for several hours, directly into the atmosphere. So there’s a long history of problems at this facility. And the problems, it seems, have only gotten, you know, worse since they’ve brought in scabs to run the facility.
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