Kentucky right to investigate candle factory deaths. Workers’ families deserve answers.
It’s not yet clear exactly what happened on Friday night at the Mayfield Consumer Products factory before a massive tornado hit the plant and killed eight employees, but state officials are doing exactly the right thing with an OSHA investigation that was announced on Tuesday.
In announcing the investigation, Gov. Andy Beshear made clear that it was standard procedure for any workplace fatalities, and that he knew of no wrongdoing. The eight deaths of candle factory employees are far fewer than the originally projected 70, but we have now received disturbing reports from NBC News about four employees who said as many as 15 workers had asked to leave as the storms grew closer, but were were threatened with losing their jobs.
A company spokesman has denied those claims, saying that it was company policy to let employees leave when they wanted and return the next day.
It appears that numerous employees did leave before the tornado destroyed the plant and were unaccounted for the next day because of communication issues. That’s why the feared death toll gave way to better news.
But we know enough to urge more questions about what really went on at a company that paid $8 an hour and used inmate labor from the Graves County Jail. A deputy jailer who was overseeing several workers reportedly led them to safety but he himself was killed.
Similar questions about training and cellphone policies are being asked about six deaths at an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois from the same line of tornadoes.
The reports have disturbed State Sen. Morgan McGarvey, D-Louisville, enough that he said on Tuesday he would file legislation to “to hold accountable those who force workers to stay and risk their lives during severe weather,” he said in a tweet.
Workplace protections truly began in 1911 after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, when 146 garment workers, most of them young women immigrants, died during a fire because the doors and stairwells were locked to prevent employees from leaving. Some of them jumped to their death out of open windows. The fire led to better workplace standards, such as the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, and led to the rise of organized labor. MCP is not a union shop, according to the United Food and Commercial Worker Union, which represents other companies in the area.
MCP is an important economic engine in Mayfield, receiving some state subsidies to stay in a region where many manufacturers had already left. Nonetheless, the families of those killed, and everyone who works in Kentucky’s numerous factories, deserve answers to what went wrong in this tragedy.