Why Does Texas Protect BP?
Texas Watch—July 27th, 2010
Right in our backyard is the most dangerous industrial plant in the nation. It is owned and operated by none other than BP. The plant in Texas City has a long and notorious track record of “willful and egregious” safety violations. Under current law, BP is immune from responsibility for needlessly killing or injuring its workers in Texas. Why?
The answer is obvious. Lobbyists have been hard at work in the both the legislature and the courts carving out special protections for plant and refinery owners like BP. Never mind the fact that BP leads the nation in refinery deaths, that 41 Texans have lost their lives because of safety lapses at its Texas City plant, or that the company has more willful safety violations than any other company by a mile.
This map from the Center for Public Integrity plots OSHA violations at plants across the country. You can see just how BP’s plant in Texas City stacks up:
To make matters worse, those same lobbyists are astonishingly and shamefully headed to the Texas Capitol again this week to ask for even more protections for BP and its ilk. They are expected to ask lawmakers to consider socializing the havoc wreaked by a few bad actors who fail make a safety a priority. They plan to force even more injured workers into a broken workers’ comp system or create some new catastrophic injury plan funded by a new levy on all businesses in Texas. Why in the world should good companies be forced to pay for the actions of dangerous ones?
Instead of protecting BP-style behavior, we should reverse the cost-benefit equation so that it costs more to cut corners on safety than it does to implement reasonable safety protocols that are proven to save lives. The best way to do this is to hold the wrongdoers who cause needless workplace deaths and injuries fully accountable in a court of law. BP and companies like it should pay a consequence for its egregious behavior.
Take a look at our new web video:
