Anger and Mourning on the American Right
What was life like in the plants themselves? I wondered. Were they governed by Donny’s Cowboy perspective or Mike Tritico’s precautionary principle? One safety inspector for Axiall—which had an enormous explosion in 2013 and again in 2014—had the job of trying to reduce the risk of accidents. The young man climbed towers and squeezed under machines to check pipes and valves and attach small red flags to pipes needed replacing or valves tightening. Operators didn’t like him coming around because each red flag meant extra work, he said. Some waved him away. “No, not today.” Then he said, “They would gang up. I’d have to call their boss, and they hated that. So when they saw me, they’d say, ‘Here comes Big Brother.’ It was a stressful job.”
On hearing this story, a man hired as a corporate industrial hygienist, tasked with sampling acid mist in the battery-charging area in a Ford battery plant, recounted this: “To set up the air monitors, I had to wear a respirator. Staff asked me to take it off since it might make workers who saw me with it on worry about the ill effect of the air on them. But they needn’t have worried. Some of the guys started to taunt me, the corporate sissy who couldn’t tough it out like they [did]. But when they laughed at me, I could see their teeth were visibly eroded by exposure to sulfuric acid mist.”
--Arlie Russell Hochschild