HOUSTON, Aug 4 - The United Steelworkers union pulled out of talks on Tuesday with the American Petroleum Institute over refinery safety standards, saying oil companies wanted as few regulations and mandates as possible.
The talks were an outgrowth of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board's probe of the deadly 2005 BP (BP.L) Texas City, Texas, refinery explosion, and aimed at developing indicators for refinery safety problems and a standard to reduce worker fatigue.
Instead the union found delays and frustration in committees stacked against them, said a USW vice president.
The union said it plans "a comprehensive campaign" to push for tighter rules on how refiners operate their plants.
"This is not supposed to be an adversarial process," said USW International Vice President Gary Beevers in a telephone interview. "This affects everyone, hourly employees, contract workers, managers, the communities around the refineries."
API representatives said the USW's withdrawal comes within months of issuing the standards.
"We will come out with standards that will improve safety at refineries," said Bob Greco, downstream group director for API, the U.S. oil and natural gas industry's trade association.
Negotiations for the safety indicators, intended to point out national trends as well as individual plant problems, and the fatigue standard began a year after the CSB recommended the talks in its March 2007 final report on the Texas City blast.
"They refused to contact us until March 2008," Beevers said.
Greco said the API was first focused on completing urgent recommendations from the CSB on work trailers. The 15 people killed at Texas City were in or around work trailers when the blast occurred.
Beevers contends the memberships of the two committees were set up to favor oil industry representatives, but API says only about half the committees' members were refiners with the other members coming from chemical companies, engineering firms and industry associations.
The USW was invited to add more members, said David Miller, API director of standards, but did not.
"I could have brought 200 people and we could have voted 200 to 25, but that wasn't the spirit of what the CSB had intended," Beevers said.
The CSB had called for representatives from industry, labor, government, public interest and environmental groups along with experts from the necessary scientific disciplines to develop consensus standards.
On the indicators committee, the dispute was about transparency in reporting problems at refineries.
Greco said the API wants to make sure, over a year or two, the indicators it gathers are effective measures of safety, before making them public.
"We share the same desire to get the data out," he said.
Beevers said little can be gained by keeping information under wraps.
"There must be reporting of all events, major and minor, to hold these companies accountable for their approach to safety and to enable them to learn from each other's mistakes," he said.
For the fatigue rule, the split came over requiring refiners to reduce the use of open schedules, when workers are pulled off their normal duties to perform other tasks for weeks or months. Fellow workers are called on to labor overtime to take up the slack.
"They wouldn't have this as a mandatory standard," Beevers said. "It's going to be a recommended practice."
Greco said the sole focus of the fatigue discussions should not be open schedules.
The talks were an outgrowth of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board's probe of the deadly 2005 BP (BP.L) Texas City, Texas, refinery explosion, and aimed at developing indicators for refinery safety problems and a standard to reduce worker fatigue.
Instead the union found delays and frustration in committees stacked against them, said a USW vice president.
The union said it plans "a comprehensive campaign" to push for tighter rules on how refiners operate their plants.
"This is not supposed to be an adversarial process," said USW International Vice President Gary Beevers in a telephone interview. "This affects everyone, hourly employees, contract workers, managers, the communities around the refineries."
API representatives said the USW's withdrawal comes within months of issuing the standards.
"We will come out with standards that will improve safety at refineries," said Bob Greco, downstream group director for API, the U.S. oil and natural gas industry's trade association.
Negotiations for the safety indicators, intended to point out national trends as well as individual plant problems, and the fatigue standard began a year after the CSB recommended the talks in its March 2007 final report on the Texas City blast.
"They refused to contact us until March 2008," Beevers said.
Greco said the API was first focused on completing urgent recommendations from the CSB on work trailers. The 15 people killed at Texas City were in or around work trailers when the blast occurred.
Beevers contends the memberships of the two committees were set up to favor oil industry representatives, but API says only about half the committees' members were refiners with the other members coming from chemical companies, engineering firms and industry associations.
The USW was invited to add more members, said David Miller, API director of standards, but did not.
"I could have brought 200 people and we could have voted 200 to 25, but that wasn't the spirit of what the CSB had intended," Beevers said.
The CSB had called for representatives from industry, labor, government, public interest and environmental groups along with experts from the necessary scientific disciplines to develop consensus standards.
On the indicators committee, the dispute was about transparency in reporting problems at refineries.
Greco said the API wants to make sure, over a year or two, the indicators it gathers are effective measures of safety, before making them public.
"We share the same desire to get the data out," he said.
Beevers said little can be gained by keeping information under wraps.
"There must be reporting of all events, major and minor, to hold these companies accountable for their approach to safety and to enable them to learn from each other's mistakes," he said.
For the fatigue rule, the split came over requiring refiners to reduce the use of open schedules, when workers are pulled off their normal duties to perform other tasks for weeks or months. Fellow workers are called on to labor overtime to take up the slack.
"They wouldn't have this as a mandatory standard," Beevers said. "It's going to be a recommended practice."
Greco said the sole focus of the fatigue discussions should not be open schedules.
