In March, 47-year-old Eleazar Torres-Gomez was killed due to unsafe working conditions at his job. His employer knowingly failed to implement standard safety regulations. This is a crime caused by the drive for capitalist profits.
Torres-Gomez worked at the Cintas Corp., one of the largest uniform suppliers in the country. Cintas employs more than 34,000 workers at 400 facilities.
He operated an industrial-sized washer and dryer at a facility in Tulsa, Okla. While trying to separate a jam of wet clothes, Torres-Gomez was caught in the conveyor belt, dragged and eventually fell into the dryer, which runs at a temperature of 300?F. He was trapped for 20 minutes, dying from trauma and thermal injuries.
This tragedy could have been avoided. Torres-Gomez’s son Emmanuel said, “The thought of how my father must have suffered haunts me and my family every day. I also think about how Cintas could have prevented this terrible strategy.”
Cintas ignored a basic safety procedure known as “locking-out/tagging-out,” which requires that equipment be shut down and power locked out during the event of a jam. Had this safety standard been implemented, it would have saved Torres-Gomez’s life.
For corporations like Cintas that are driven by the never-ending quest for greater profits, it is not cost efficient to implement safety regulations that protect workers.
Following an investigation of Torres-Gomez’s death, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a body of the Department of Labor, identified 46 illegal hazards at the Tulsa facility.
The investigation found that Cintas routinely violated the lock-out/tag-out standards, failed to train personnel in the lockout/tag out procedures, failed to protect employees from being stuck or pinned by the conveyor belt and did not install guards to protect workers from falling into the machines. In 2005, Cintas was fined for operating industrial dryers without the required safety guards.
On Aug. 17, Cintas was fined $2.78 million for its willful neglect—the largest fine imposed on any corporation in OSHA’s history. Other Cintas facilities in Washington, Alabama and Arkansas are now being investigated for similar violations.
Cintas is not alone in its crimes. There were 568 deaths caused by employer neglect in 2005, and 516 in 2006.
Recently, over a dozen coal miners in Indiana and Utah died because of preventable safety hazards. Like Torres-Gomez, their lives were less precious to the capitalists than what they produced.
Corporations should be fined for their crimes. But as long as capitalism exists, corporations will never be truly accountable for workers’ lives.
