The Jungle but with ice cream
September 13, 2015 7:52 PM   Subscribe

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- frimble



 
Can one of MF's resident capitalist cheerleaders explain to me why a CEO who pursues profit at the expense of employee and customer well-being should face assault and murder charges when the precious profits needed to buy a fifth house or solid-gold hat or whatever are more valuable than other human beings?

Starting at "supervisors" and going up the chain, all of those people who ignored obvious risks in pursuit of profit should face charges. You want the big money? You get the big responsibility.
posted by maxwelton at 8:14 PM on September 13, 2015 [12 favorites]


Colvin couldn't sue Blue Bell because Texas companies covered by workers' compensation are immune from civil liability for workplace injuries unless gross negligence causes a death.

Fuck whoever wrote and passed that law.
posted by Ickster at 8:24 PM on September 13, 2015 [39 favorites]


Only 54 of about 200 production employees were trained on lockout-tagout, OSHA reported. But employees said they couldn't put it to use because they didn't have enough locks or tags.

This is such incredible bullshit. I have been trained on lockout-tagout procedures at multiple jobs, and I have never worked in a position responsible for performing them. It's important that everyone know how it works so that everyone knows you do not mess with a machine being repaired until it's fixed. You can't call the problem solved until the person who locked it in the first place signs off, so that some other person who wasn't aware of the problem can't just say, sure, this looks fine to me -- go ahead and use this equipment! That's the gist of it. Not so hard, right?

It said Blue Bell didn't put guards on moving machine parts

What the fuck.

Safety is not all that expensive or difficult. If you can do the job, you can do the job safely. However, having a commitment to workplace safety makes it clear that workers should have agency over their work environments and the right to protect themselves from harm, and I believe that's what keeps some employers from doing it. It's not just "oh, that's expensive." It's "oh, we don't want to give them the idea that they're valuable."

And we are valuable. The people whose "work" consists of reducing workers' compensation and OSHA funding wouldn't last a single shift on a factory floor.
posted by asperity at 8:50 PM on September 13, 2015 [57 favorites]


Whenever you hear company shit-spinners come out with something like “We are a family at Blue Bell …” you know that they are guilty as hell.
posted by scruss at 9:16 PM on September 13, 2015 [19 favorites]


Fuck whoever wrote and passed that law.

That's the grand bargain of workers' compensation laws.

If you're injured at work, regardless of fault, you get a fixed, defined payout. But in return, you lose the right to sue your employer for more than that fixed amount except in the case of gross negligence.

Absent that bargain, you'd have to start dealing with, "Well, yes, his fingers were cut off in the machine. But he stuck his hand into the machine, so it was really his own fault. Dozens of other workers work with that machine, paid attention to the anti-sticking-hands-in-the-machine training we gave them, and haven't had a problem."
posted by Hatashran at 9:17 PM on September 13, 2015 [8 favorites]


Oh, Texas...

And, of course, by that I mean "Christ, what assholes."
posted by Thorzdad at 9:21 PM on September 13, 2015 [7 favorites]


Is there anything that capitalism hasn't ruined?
posted by turbid dahlia at 9:32 PM on September 13, 2015 [8 favorites]


That's the grand bargain of workers' compensation laws.

And there are definitely good reasons that's how it works, but that bargain's been getting worse by the year.

OSHA points out that "injured workers and taxpayers subsidize high-hazard employers" (PDF), and I don't see how it will ever be different until we have fairer workers' compensation laws (and funding to make sure that workers can use them.) As it is, the near-certainty that unsafe employers will never have to answer for their sins--in proportion to the harm they cause--serves as an incentive for them to continue injuring workers. And everyone else pays for it.
posted by asperity at 9:39 PM on September 13, 2015 [10 favorites]


True. Though if Texas gets the same number of OSHA inspectors every other state gets (what is it, like, one?) they're even worse off than the norm since they're so damned big. And sometimes the resulting explosions are big, too.
posted by asperity at 10:03 PM on September 13, 2015 [4 favorites]


OSHA fined Blue Bell $27,000, negotiated down to $20,000. The company instituted a lockout-tagout program and placed lock stations throughout the plant.
...
Revenue Estimated US$680 million (2014)
That'll show 'em.
posted by klanawa at 10:06 PM on September 13, 2015 [14 favorites]


“Blue Bell tastes just like the good old days.” Apparently meaning when an company could run a company town, maim employees, and ship products filled with filth without fear of retribution. By all means, don't fix the vent that drips dirty water onto the finished product, just "dry it off real good" when you're about to be inspected. No surprise inspections, of course, because that would require having enough inspectors to actually ensure a safe food supply, and you couldn't drown that government in a bathtub.

God Bless America.
posted by ob1quixote at 10:31 PM on September 13, 2015 [17 favorites]


I grew up eating those ice cream sandwiches and I think the sight of them is going to make me sick after reading all this. I thought I was eating good food made safely by my neighbors up the road when I was young. I know it's better to have my illusions ripped away, but I'm sad that what seemed like a company run on decent principles proved to be so scummy, both figuratively and literally.
posted by immlass at 10:40 PM on September 13, 2015 [8 favorites]


I've heard too many horror stories from friends who have worked industrial food service to think that this is an isolated incident. For example, one of my friends worked on a frozen dinner assembly line, and some of his coworkers would regularly spit on the floor. Some of them came to work sick, some had tuberculosis. If, say, a frozen chicken patty fell on that floor, guess what? Right back on the tray. Yum.

I feel like most industrial processed food has this kind of bullshit lurking just under the rug they've swept it under. The Jungle is right, and until we start taking food safety seriously (by which I mean: give them a lot more money for testing and inspectors), it's not going to get any better. There is too much money to be made by flagrantly ignoring the law, and when you're alerted in advance that OSHA or the USDA is going to come calling, it's relatively easy to shut down the line and have your workers spend a few shifts cleaning so everything looks above the board. If corners can be cut, they will be cut. Who's going to stop them?

Do you really want to know how your hotdogs get made? Make your food at home if you can.
posted by Feyala at 11:06 PM on September 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


This is a classic "Speedup Sundae." It consists of a few scoops of Taylorism, generously covered with a special "Lean Six Sigma Gone Wild" syrup and topped with a cherry of MBA dumbassery. And to make the product complete, it's sprinkled with a fine veneer of platitude and corporate-speak babbledegook.

The specifics of this situation are absolutely outrageous. I want to go one step further. I want to argue that this is what proto-fascism looks like. It's everywhere.

There are lots of definitions/descriptions of fascist ideology--many have been discussed here in the blue. I'd like to offer mine: Fascism is the process of auto-cannibalizing an economy and its constituents in a society/culture in which there have previously been a number of institutions and policies which were/are designed to protect not only the working classes, but also those policies which are conceived to further the objective material conditions under which a society reproduces itself. When a society has a powerful component of "leaders" who deliberately create an intellectual framework for looting an economy, for smashing labor, for squeezing every last human element out of the productive process, then you have the basis for fascism. And when these leaders begin to consistently find ways to actually implement the components of their intellectual framework into everyday life, whether it be by asserting that shareholder value is superior to the value created by honest labor, or by suppressing the native creativity that each human being possesses via obsessive super-imposition of irrational forms of lean philosophy, then you have actual fascism in practice in (at least) significant sectors of the economy.

If we do not put a stop to this ever-broadening spectrum of policies which devolve our economy then what happens next is even uglier. We have to stop this in a non-violent, rational way. Are we a nation of laws or are we a nation of whimsical parasites and the victims of such parasites?

Sorry for the rant. This stuff makes me both furious and sad. I've watched (and tried to fight against) this slow devolution for practically my entire adult life. What happened at Blue Bell is an egregious case of willful negligence. It's inexcusable. Some folks knew better but decided to go with the flow. Others are clearly victims of the "What? Me, worry?" philosophy of middle-management "get along to go along" which dominates our time. That it is happening on a wide scale and with such frequency (even if most fascist violations of the human spirit are less obvious to us as we walk through life) is a genuine cause for distress. Those alarm bells clanging in the distance at the edge of perception? They are real.
posted by CincyBlues at 11:11 PM on September 13, 2015 [34 favorites]


OK, I'll play resident capitalist cheerleader. Shitty company is shitty. Not sure what the connection is. As long as humans run the show, greed and laziness will be a risk factor, state owned or private.

Thing here is, had it not been for the listeria breakout, everyone would still be loving on the Blue Bell family, with all the warm fuzzies they had in ignorance.

Considering the incidence of death and dismemberment, I'd think meaningful punishment could be meted out. Particularly since it's looking increasingly like there may be no salvaging of company reputation. I'd also think that meting out meaningful punishment would be such a huge headache to determine, considering the chain of responsibilities involved in the failures, that there's little chance of actual punishment happening.
posted by 2N2222 at 11:23 PM on September 13, 2015 [5 favorites]


The low fines are a large part of the problem. Combined with the lack of any incentive to clean up your act to avoid lawsuits thanks to tort "reform," it is best for the bottom line to ignore food and worker safety. You either have to have strong regulation or a strong tort system. Either one works, because either one internalizes the cost of bad behavior. Having neither is just one more form of corporate welfare.
posted by wierdo at 11:34 PM on September 13, 2015 [5 favorites]


If corporations are supposed to be people we need to figure out a way to send the criminal ones to prison more frequently.
posted by biffa at 12:00 AM on September 14, 2015 [16 favorites]


Intentions notwithstanding, such laws as these are attributable to the Republican Party of Texas and its pro-business atmosphere, which have dominated the Legislature for a generation.

Geez ... and I live here.
posted by key_of_z at 12:33 AM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Considering the incidence of death and dismemberment, I'd think meaningful punishment could be meted out. Particularly since it's looking increasingly like there may be no salvaging of company reputation. I'd also think that meting out meaningful punishment would be such a huge headache to determine, considering the chain of responsibilities involved in the failures, that there's little chance of actual punishment happening.

You might think that, but it won't, albeit not for the reasons you're listing. OSHA and civil litigation are the mechanisms of punishment. OSHA is nearly toothless ($27K in fines levied against a $680M company, negotiated down to $20K). And as Hatashran observes, if you take advantage of worker's comp (which you pretty much have to if you don't have the wherewithal to pay your medical bills out of pocket - most health insurance companies will not cover your injuries if they're workplace accidents), you have to prove gross negligence. That requires documentation of wrongdoing that's pretty expensive to acquire. Ultimately, it's the individual injured worker against the company, and that worker wasn't working at the shitty underpaid unsafe job for fun - he didn't have lots of money to start with, and he doesn't have any more now.
posted by gingerest at 1:06 AM on September 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


First generation rich, third generation poor. The country is littered with failed companies run into the ground by soft, spoiled grandchildren who never really gave a shit about the what made the company run - and the family rich.
posted by klarck at 3:41 AM on September 14, 2015 [4 favorites]


There are so many people who are above the law. BP executives. The assholes on wall street. Dick Cheney and his buddies all belong in small cells playing the harmonica.

Compared to those unpunished criminals, I guess selling poisoned ice cream to children is small potatoes.
posted by double block and bleed at 3:53 AM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


We so desperately need tougher protections for whistle blowers. Oh, and while I'm not gullible enough to believe these problems are only happening at Blue Bell, I still won't ever touch their products again, especially since I used to buy their ice cream for my Grandmother. Seriously, screw them.
posted by Beholder at 4:10 AM on September 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
posted by lalochezia at 4:28 AM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Beholder: We so desperately need tougher protections for whistle blowers.

Not to mention some kind of compensation. A whistleblower that causes a plant like this to be shut down and throw hundreds out of work is going to get their house torched.
posted by dr_dank at 4:39 AM on September 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

I dunno. Seems like caustic cleaning agents and water heated to 160 degrees might do the trick, too. If you say something like "sunlight is the best disinfectant" to sociopaths like Paul Kruse, there's a good chance you'll just end up with factories with no roofs.
posted by Mayor West at 4:49 AM on September 14, 2015 [6 favorites]


  … Dick Cheney and his buddies all belong in small cells playing the harmonica.

Dick Cheney and his buddies all belong in small cells ⁁next to a guy⁁ playing the harmonica bagpipes.

ftfy.
posted by scruss at 4:53 AM on September 14, 2015 [6 favorites]


Thing here is, had it not been for the listeria breakout, everyone would still be loving on the Blue Bell family, with all the warm fuzzies they had in ignorance.

I really don't know what your point is, here.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 5:32 AM on September 14, 2015


This is a great reason why we shouldn't shrink a government, remove is regulatory powers and hope everything goes swimmingly.
posted by Erberus at 6:25 AM on September 14, 2015


Thing here is, had it not been for the listeria breakout, everyone would still be loving on the Blue Bell family, with all the warm fuzzies they had in ignorance.

Yes, that is true. If we hadn't become aware of the massive problems at Blue Bell, we would still be ignorant of them. If you are saying we need stricter inspections and top-notch consumer reporting so this kind of thing can't slip by us for so long again, I agree. If you are implying that there's something wrong with people who generally thought well of Blue Bell before they were given reasons not to--dude, I have enough going on in my own life. I don't have time to personally investigate every company whose products I use. That's why we need regular oversight from people who are paid to do that.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:52 AM on September 14, 2015 [15 favorites]


Bless their hearts.
posted by fiercecupcake at 6:59 AM on September 14, 2015


I grew up eating those ice cream sandwiches and I think the sight of them is going to make me sick after reading all this. I thought I was eating good food made safely by my neighbors up the road when I was young. I know it's better to have my illusions ripped away, but I'm sad that what seemed like a company run on decent principles proved to be so scummy, both figuratively and literally.

It's sort of interesting to note that Upton Sinclair was way more concerned about working conditions than he was about food safety. His intent behind The Jungle, as I understand it, was to fix the plight of workers. What really got people going, though, were the accounts in the book like the one of the guy who was killed after falling into a rendering vat.

People were more like "Ew, there might be people in my food" than "Oh, shit, the people making my food are horribly mistreated" (not saying that's what you're doing here - was just using your experience with the food they make as an example of the direct connection people feel because "Ew, I ate that.")

And it's not that food safety isn't or shouldn't be a concern - gross is gross, and poor food safety regulation costs lives. But it's easier to say "food safety" than "union."

Reading the article, the parallels with some of the meatpacking industry stuff Eric Schlosser writes about in Fast Food Nation surface yet again, like butterfat in a stagnant pool of water that's too cold to remove it all.

There's an account somewhere in Fast Food Nation where he discusses how, at a plant that alternately packs meat for North American and EU customers, the people working there preferred the EU-pack days because the line had to operate more slowly out of necessity. EU regulations demanded more rigorous inspection, so they had to be more careful removing guts to avoid contaminating the meat with intestinal matter. The plant ran at a more manageable pace on those days.

But when that book was published, people spent way more time obsessing about the food and its consumption than working conditions and quality of life for the people who produce it.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:24 AM on September 14, 2015 [6 favorites]


They had... slime in the ice (cream) machine!

MARVIN ZINDLER, EYEWITNESS NEWS
posted by fungible at 8:58 AM on September 14, 2015 [6 favorites]


Thank you, Marvin.
posted by fiercecupcake at 9:54 AM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


There is one non-government entity which has a shot at getting unsafe employers to shape up: insurance companies. Most companies that give even a bit of lip service to workplace safety do so not because they're scared of OSHA, but because their insurers strongly encourage them to do so.

But you've got to have significant enough insurance costs to make saving money on insurance premiums seem like a good investment. There are two main reasons to carry higher levels of insurance coverage that I know of: either the state requires you to do it, or other companies you do business with require you to do it.

It's pretty clear that Texas isn't requiring much, and I suspect ice cream manufacturers don't do many of the kinds of transactions that prompt a request for a certificate of insurance (they're not doing work on other people's property, etc.) The insurers don't have much reason to intervene here (by charging the employer more), as they don't stand to lose much.

In this case, and many others like it, both the public and private mechanisms for promoting workplace safety are failing, and it's everyone other than the responsible parties paying for it.
posted by asperity at 10:12 AM on September 14, 2015


There is one non-government entity which has a shot at getting unsafe employers to shape up: insurance companies.

However, insurance companies don't necessarily care about the level of claims. What they care about is the predictability of claims. If all companies are equally lax in safety then the insurance companies will just charge them all accordingly. They have no particular interest in lowering the overall claims rate of the industry because that just lowers their revenue and profit as a percentage. It is only if there is significant disparity in claims between companies that it pays for the insurance company to discriminate.

If regulators would aggressively inspect and publish violations, then insurance companies might have reason to lean on companies regarding safety. The restrictions on company liability under current workers compensation rules reduces insurance company interest in safety.
posted by JackFlash at 11:02 AM on September 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


And it's not that food safety isn't or shouldn't be a concern - gross is gross, and poor food safety regulation costs lives. But it's easier to say "food safety" than "union."

I'm in favor of both! (I'm the freak who thinks software programmers ought to unionize.) But Blue Bell also sold itself as a happy company: "we eat all we can and sell the rest" was what the ads used to say. While that doesn't rule out occasional disagreements, it definitely is meant to imply it's a safe place to work. I think for me as an early Gen Xer, it's just my horror at the way the country I grew up in, where we had stuff like food safety enforcement and unions, has been hollowed out by Reaganism so that the forms of things like OSHA and the EPA and the FDA remain, but the actual functions have fallen by the wayside.
posted by immlass at 11:18 AM on September 14, 2015 [4 favorites]


The restrictions on company liability under current workers compensation rules reduces insurance company interest in safety.

Absolutely. It's not desirable to leave government regulations at their current weak level, and for most companies that aren't subject to a lot of intertwining insurance policies (contracts requiring everyone involved with a project to carry a certain high level of coverage, say) that threat of liability's the only motivation insurers have.

Right now there's no threat that violations will result in insurers losing any significant money at all.
posted by asperity at 11:26 AM on September 14, 2015


My question is why are the OSHA fines so low? $20K for a $600M+/yr company is about 15 minutes of revenue. It probably costs more than that when all the employees stop to listen to "an important message" from the CEO.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:51 AM on September 14, 2015 [5 favorites]


When your fines amount to a measly $20,000 per incident and the injured person can't sue you, the rise in insurance premiums you would expect with operating dangerous equipment is affordable. You are making more than enough money to cover your expected expenses and to give the investors their yearly profit. The only people who give a damn about a worker's well-being would be themselves, their co-workers who are too afraid to say something, and OSHA who doesn't have the clout to actually do something to improve the working conditions. So you better be vigilant about those fingers, people, because you are the only one who is going to keep them attached to your body.
posted by Foam Pants at 11:54 AM on September 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


My question is why are the OSHA fines so low? $20K for a $600M+/yr company is about 15 minutes of revenue.

So far as I can tell, it's because the OSH Act establishing OSHA was passed in 1970 and the fines have only been updated once since then (from lots of sources but specifically testimony to pass a bill that is five years later still making its way through Congress).

Are you in the U.S. and looking for some action to take after reading this story? Ask your member of Congress to support the Protecting America's Workers Act to modernize OSHA law.

To speak more locally for a second, this article was heartbreaking to read (and a staggering shock from the pro-business Chron). Blue Bell has for years provided the popsicles we give away each year on the first day of school. In a city filled with newcomers--myself included--you can usually tell a native by their favorite flavor of Blue Bell. Mine, by the way, is 'they don't make a lactose free one.'

So of course everyone here knew when the Dallas billionaire bought a stake in the company and everyone knew when the ice cream came back on the shelves (and everyone knew it was at HEB).

All that loyalty to a company that has demonstrated that it in no way deserves it.
posted by librarylis at 2:21 PM on September 14, 2015 [5 favorites]


I don't understand why fines have dollar figures, rather than % of revenues. (I mean, I do understand, it just bugs me). Even 10% would be a significant hit to most companies, and it's harder to hide revenue than it is to hide profit--so just fine 'em a solid chunk of every dollar that walks through the door.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 3:29 PM on September 14, 2015 [4 favorites]


Such a huge, huge difference from what is going on at Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams.
posted by bibliogrrl at 8:26 PM on September 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


I don't understand why fines have dollar figures, rather than % of revenues.

It doesn't have to be that way. For example in Finland, speeding tickets are based on income. There were a couple of infamous cases in which multi-millionaires were fined $56,000 and $103,000 for speeding.
posted by JackFlash at 11:06 PM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


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