Imperial Sugar Explosion: Capitalists Profit, Workers Die

Eleven Workers Killed Near Savannah, Georgia

FEBRUARY 25—“The building shook, and the lights went out. I thought the roof was falling in,” a forklift operator told the Savannah Morning News. On February 7, an explosion at the Dixie Crystals sugar refinery just outside Savannah, Georgia, ignited the plant and set it ablaze. Eleven workers have died so far. Dozens have been injured; 13 remain hospitalized. “I saw people come running out burnt, screaming, hollering, their skin hanging off them,” one witness told the New York Times (9 February). Captain Matt Stanley from the Savannah Fire Department called it a “dormant volcano full of lava” (CNN.com, 12 February). A machine operator working on the third floor of the plant described how “there was fire all over the building.” “We climbed out of there from the third floor to the first floor,” she said. “Half the floor was gone. The second floor was debris, the first floor was debris” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 7 February). For a week firefighters battled the fire while rescue workers looked for burnt bodies.

This atrocity was no “accident” or “tragedy,” as John Sheptor, the CEO of Imperial Sugar, the plant’s parent company, claimed. The sugar refinery plant at Port Wentworth was a firetrap waiting to explode. The plant was first built in 1917 and one of the antiquated processing buildings that exploded was constructed of wood soaked in creosote—called “fat lighter” because it is so flammable. Even though the plant sits right by the Savannah River, firefighters quickly encountered water pressure problems as they combatted the blaze. Government investigators have found evidence that combustible sugar dust had accumulated beneath silos next to the processing plant in a basement area where conveyor belts are used to move processed sugar. In early January, the plant was rocked by a smaller explosion in the dust removal equipment.

“We are concerned about the families,” intoned CEO Sheptor. In fact, a relative of an injured worker told Workers Vanguard that the workers’ impoverished family members are relying on community donations to afford the three-hour trip to Augusta, Georgia, to see their relatives at the burn ward. As she told WV, that money should be coming from the company. Instead, several longshoremen who work near the sugar plant told WV that the company is now using scare tactics against the workers—claiming that if they sue, the company will go bankrupt and the plant will not be rebuilt. Dixie Crystals refinery accounts for some 9 percent of the total refined sugar capacity in the U.S. The Imperial Sugar Company, headquartered near Houston, Texas, is one of the largest sugar companies in the U.S., with gross profits of almost $105 million in 2007.

To the capitalist bosses, the lives of workers are expendable in the service of the bottom line. In 2006 alone, more than 5,700 workers died at work and millions more were injured nationwide. The sugar refining industry is prone to dust explosions that are preventable. Last November, an explosion rocked the Domino Sugar refinery in Baltimore, Maryland, injuring two workers. According to the United States Chemical Safety Board (CSB), between 1980 and 2005 there were 281 dust explosions, killing 119 workers and injuring 718 more.

In the clash between protecting workers’ lives and boosting capitalist profits, the main weapon workers have to defend themselves is the union. The Dixie Crystals refinery was a non-union plant, although other Imperial Sugar refineries are unionized. Every factory and worksite should have union safety committees with the power to shut down unsafe locations. With the overwhelming majority of U.S. workers unorganized, what is desperately needed is a class-struggle fight to organize the unorganized. Especially in the notoriously anti-union, “right to work” South, this means that the labor movement must fight against the racial oppression of black people that has long been used by the capitalists to divide and weaken labor. The name Dixie Crystals—with a plant workforce that is majority black—highlights this legacy of racist oppression.

Workers from the powerful International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which organizes workers at other sugar refineries, had unloaded raw sugar at the refinery’s dock. The ILA should have been playing a leading role in fighting to unionize that plant, but the Savannah labor movement has never made a concerted effort to organize these refinery workers. Instead, the pro-capitalist labor tops push reliance on capitalist politicians and government agencies, renouncing the very class-struggle methods that built the union movement in this country. The response of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)—who between them organize sugar plants throughout the country—to the disaster in Port Wentworth is indicative. Rather than seeing it as a clarion call to fight to organize the unorganized, the UFCW and IBT filed a petition to the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to strengthen its regulations.

Government agencies such as OSHA and the CSB do not exist to protect workers. Their pretenses to safety serve to mask capitalism’s disregard for workers’ lives and safety. The labor bureaucrats are literally putting the lives and safety of workers in the hands of the bourgeois government, which exists to protect the rule and profits of the capitalist bosses. As part of a muckraking series on workers’ deaths, New York Times writer David Barstow pointed out in a 22 December 2003 article, “When Congress established OSHA in 1970, it made it a misdemeanor to cause the death of a worker by willfully violating safety laws. The maximum sentence, six months in jail, is half the maximum for harassing a wild burro on federal lands.” Between 1982 and 2002, OSHA refused to seek prosecution in 93 percent of the 1,242 cases where OSHA itself concluded workers had died from willful safety violations. OSHA had not inspected the Dixie Crystals refinery since 2000, and Dan Fuqua, an OSHA spokesman in Atlanta, told WV that the agency dismissed a complaint several years ago without even bothering to visit the plant.

In an article on the Savannah explosion, Socialist Worker (15 February), newspaper of the reformist International Socialist Organization, points out, “Since taking office, the Bush administration has chipped away at OSHA, limiting the institution of new regulations and rolling back existing ones.” Echoing the labor bureaucrats, the article concludes, “It is little wonder the agency stresses a ‘voluntary compliance strategy,’ which relies on industry associations and companies to police themselves.” What Socialist Worker willfully disappears is that the Democratic Clinton White House set the tone by its “New OSHA” initiative that stressed “partnership” with business and “voluntary compliance.”

The labor bureaucracy’s strategy of relying on the government to protect workers is part and parcel of its class-collaborationist reliance on the capitalist Democratic Party to enact more labor-friendly laws. The Change to Win Coalition, to which both the IBT and the UFCW belong, has endorsed Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, while the AFL-CIO can be trusted to campaign for whomever the Democrats nominate this year. While the Republicans are open partisans on the side of the capitalist bosses, the Democrats posture as “friends of labor” and carry out anti-working-class policies.

The capitalist rulers are waging an unrelenting war on the rights of workers, the poor, immigrants and black people to live any kind of decent life. As we wrote after a mine explosion killed twelve workers (“West Virginia Mine Disaster: Capitalist Murder,” WV No. 862, 20 January 2006):

“Only when the working class rips the means of production out of the hands of the corrupt, obscenely rich capitalist class and establishes a planned socialist economy can the health and safety of every person be ensured. That requires the forging of a multiracial workers party, leading all the exploited and oppressed in the struggle for socialist revolution.”