The story also brings up the serious question of OHSA's unconscionable behavior in this debacle. I guess they think they work for BP instead of for the American worker's safety.
I have yet to see a shred of evidence that Bob Dudley cares the least bit about safety. Even the lip service BP pays to safety would be laughable if the stakes weren't so high.
Bob Dudley, the new chief executive of BP PLC, has vowed to change the safety culture of the accident-prone oil giant in the wake of the deadly explosion and spill at one of its wells in the Gulf of Mexico last year. But the story of a little-known BP safety official on the desolate North Slope of Alaska offers some cautions about just how difficult a job that will be.
The day after the Gulf well blew out last April, killing 11 rig workers, Phil Dziubinski was suspended from his job and escorted out of his office in Alaska. The company said he was let go as part of a broad management overhaul. In a five-month skirmish, two government agencies rejected Mr. Dziubinski's claims that he was fired as retribution for warning of safety risks. His back-and-forth with the British oil giant, though, sheds light on what Mr. Dudley is up against.
...
One area where safety concerns have loomed large is Alaska's North Slope, home to BP-operated Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in North America. Workers at the field, which opened in 1977, have long complained of aging infrastructure and a lengthy backlog of needed maintenance work.
In addition, as thousands of Alaska oil workers retired in recent years, overtime has piled up, and some workers have complained of fatigue. This is an issue Mr. Dziubinski repeatedly raised with his bosses, once referring to it in an email as an "imminent safety risk." BP technicians on the North Slope work 14 days straight and it isn't uncommon for them to put in shifts lasting 16 or 18 hours, sometimes on successive days.
...
Mr. Dziubinski became BP's ethics and compliance leader for Alaska operations in mid-2006, shortly after the company suffered a 4,000-barrel oil spill on the North Slope. That happened a year after the refinery explosion in Texas City, Texas, an accident that led a federal agency called the Chemical Safety Board to suggest BP managers didn't listen enough to what workers were telling them.
"Reporting bad news was not encouraged," the report said, "and often Texas City managers did not effectively investigate incidents or take appropriate corrective action."
...
Suspicions faded, and employees soon began turning to Mr. Dziubinski with their grievances. Mark McCarty, a technician who sat on a BP health, safety and environment committee, says, "Phil was a bulldog in terms of making sure our concerns were addressed."
In 2006, BP decided to survey its Alaska workers. It had done this several years earlier and heard concerns about equipment such as fire- and gas-detection systems in need of upgrading, and complaints that cuts in staffing and training had made operations less safe. So BP re-interviewed several hundred workers to see if these issues had been addressed.
The review team, consisting of Mr. Dziubinski, three other managers and a few workers, found progress on some things, like pipeline inspections, but concluded that other matters, such as staffing levels and upgrades to fire- and gas-detection systems, still "need work."
BP's plan was to share the detailed survey results with the work force, according to the USW. Instead, BP decided not to. It declined to say why or discuss the issue.
...
Mr. Dziubinski also was frustrated that BP had decided against releasing the report, according to Mr. Kovac. "That was the beginning of the decline of Phil's relationship with upper management," he says.
In 2009, Mr. Dziubinski engaged his bosses about staffing levels and the length of work shifts. North Slope workers' normal schedule was two weeks of 12-hour days and seven-day weeks followed by two weeks off. But overtime was common, and some workers told their company safety committees that people were showing signs of fatigue. "You had walking zombies up here," says Mr. McCarty, the BP technician.
The USW asked BP in 2008 how much overtime had been logged over three years. It turned out to be double the industry average, according to Glenn Trimmer, a North Slope technician who is secretary-treasurer of the union's Alaska local.
...
Mr. Dziubinski, who had access to overtime records, informed his bosses about situations that concerned him, including one employee who had worked 36 consecutive days without proper managerial approval and who had logged 320.5 hours of overtime in a single month.
...
His emails to his bosses, which were contained in the OSHA complaint he later filed and have been reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, said the rule requiring area-manager approval for shifts of 16 hours or more was followed only about half of the time.
In an Oct. 30, 2009, email, Mr. Dziubinski described the overtime situation as "an imminent safety risk." Citing shift patterns, he wrote to his bosses that "allowing the continuation of the 16+ hour work shifts would be seen by internal and external stakeholders as putting production ahead of safety."
...
A facility called the Lisburne Production Center suffered a small spill in autumn 2009, which Mr. Dziubinski came to regard as symptomatic of a larger malaise. A worker there emailed BP two months later with a long list of equipment the worker described as out of service or not working well. Mr. Dziubinski investigated and later told the USW's Mr. Kovac, "The maintenance condition of [that facility] is in a poor state and BP management was not paying attention to it."
After he started emailing his bosses about the overwork issue, some of his responsibilities were shifted to others, Mr. Dziubinski asserted in his later OSHA filing. He also said a website where employee concerns were logged was changed, and he no longer received email notification of new complaints.
...
By May he was gone. On March 15, 2010, BP told Mr. Dziubinski, then 59 years old, that he wouldn't have a position in the Alaska operation after it was reorganized.
...
His suspension came two months after BP's ombudsman, Mr. Sporkin, had written to BP Alaska saying "we are concerned that the contractor work force has not received adequate assurances of non-retaliation for raising concerns about BP's operations."
...
Mr. Dziubinski's lawyer countered that his client had several years of consistently positive job evaluations and had received a bonus in 2008 and pay increase in 2009. His 2009 performance review described the numerous appeals workers sent to him as "a testament to his reputation and expertise."
"Phil did a fantastic job during a tough time for the company" and "had [my] fullest confidence," says a former BP Alaska executive who supervised him.