August 17, 2016 – Non-union workers at the Nissan manufacturing plant in Canton have complained for years about safety hazards and long, irregular working hours.  In June, they got some validation on one of those complaints from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which found multiple and repeated safety violations on the factory floor.

Like most car manufacturing plants, some areas on the assembly line contain pits in the floor that provide workers easier access to vehicle undercarriages.  Federal safety guidelines require these pits to have guardrails or covers to protect workers from accidentally plummeting to the bottom of the nearly-10-feet-deep concrete hole.  OSHA inspectors cited Nissan last October for precisely that problem after a worker toppled in and hit the unforgiving concrete.  Compounding the lack of a guardrail or cover, the absence of a safety net at the pit led the employee to suffer severe injuries that required hospitalization.  A fall this February caused yet another employee to be hospitalized.

This repeat violation earned Nissan a $25,000 penalty.

Other worker complaints led to similar OSHA citations at the plant for its failure to keep walkways and aisles free of oil, water, or similarly hazardous liquids.  While a slip and fall at home can be a dangerous prospect, a fall at a car factory with its sharp metal edges and hard, concrete floor can be very serious indeed.  The federal organization noted that Nissan had committed floor hazard violations in five separate locations and hit them with the maximum penalty of a $7,000 fine.

Nissan employee Travis Parks, who installs airbags and steering wheels, said he did not believe the penalties would have been needed if Nissan employees had a real voice regarding work environment and work practices prior to the OSHA investigation.

“In this plant, the workers have to go by what the company says, and a lot of times that’s not the best we can do to protect the workers.  There’s so much more we could do that we are not able to do now because we don’t have a contract,” Parks said.

Employees at the facility have attempted multiple campaigns to unionize the plant over the years, but have had to do so while battling anti-union sentiment from management and staunchly anti-worker Mississippi politicians.  Full-time employees claim plant managers have committed to hiring “pathway” workers – workers hired under temporary employment that supposedly can lead to full employment, but rarely does.  These “pathway” workers, supplied in droves by temp agencies, allow Nissan to avoid filling many positions with the full-time staff that would require full-time benefits and protections.  However, reliance upon temporary workers undermines the promises company leaders made to state government in the years preceding plant construction, promises that they would bring stable, high-paying jobs to the area in exchange for millions of dollars in tax breaks and government investment.

Management has complete control over this army of temporary workers and may fire them with only minor inconvenience.  For this reason, the temp workers remain powerless and fearful, often rejecting unionization attempts for fear of angering management.  The United Auto Workers union stalled recent attempts to hold an official vote due to lingering employee anxiety over management blow-back.  In the meantime, workers still report unsafe conditions particularly during assembly line speedups and problems with overtime and long shifts.  Workers also complain that without unionization, management neither has to clear sudden schedule changes nor give employees time to make family arrangements.

University of Mississippi journalism professor Joe Atkins, an organized labor advocate, said the OSHA violations are not a surprise, considering the lack of communication that traditionally plagues employees and management in a non-unionized environment.

“Some things just don’t happen in a non-unionized environment, and it makes things dangerous for everybody.  Consider that when there is an injury on the job they have to clear this injury with medi­cal personnel at the plant, but the medical personnel is usually not a doctor.  It’s usually a nurse practitioner, who tends to say ‘things are okay.  Just get back to work.’  So we have a few examples coming up in Canton of injuries on the job that were not treated properly onsite before transporta­tion to the hospital, so they became more serious once they got to the hospital,” Atkins said.

Atkins said that unions “help keep people honest” in these situations, primarily because unions want what management wants: a productive workforce that’s healthy and enjoying its job.

Nissan officials deny putting any anti-union pressure on workers, even though employees say they have endured multiple anti-union one-on-one meetings with managers.  French and European offi­cials find Nissan’s claim to be dubious at best.  More than 30 French and European policymakers demanded Renault-Nissan remain neutral in union organizing efforts in Canton, and a member of the French Parliament visited Mississippi recently in an effort to push the company to stay out of the union argument.

However, Nissan officials turned French Parliament leader Christian Hutin away from the plant last month, claiming the French officials had no scheduled appointment.  Hutin and French representatives are involved because the French government has an ownership stake in Nissan’s business partner, the Renault Group, which owns 42 percent of Nissan.

Currently, the push to unionize the Canton plant has been visible in Brazil as union supporters protest Nissan as a sponsor of the Olympic Games.

Source: MS NAACP State Conference