Oil Workers Strike: Everyone Out, Stop ALL Scabs

On February 1, 3,800 oil refinery workers launched a health and safety strike against the deadly combination of outsourcing, short staffing, and forced overtime. The strikers are members of the United Steel Workers Union (USW), which represents 30,000 oil industry workers, at 63 refineries, oil terminals, pipelines, and petrochemical facilities. They produce 65 percent of U.S. oil.
The walkouts took place at nine strategic refineries in Texas, Kentucky, Washington, and California that produce 1.82 million barrels of fuel a day. The rest of the workers are working on 24-hour contract extensions that could end at any time, and which could shut down the rest of the organized sites. This would be the first industry-wide strike since 1980, when all the workers walked out together, and stayed out for three months.
The union called the strike after rejecting proposals from Royal Dutch Shell, the lead negotiator for the industry. The other companies involved in the strike are Tesoro Corporation, Exxon Mobil, Marathon Petroleum, and LyondellBasell Industries. The U.S. oil industry made almost $90 billion in profit in 2014.
Big Oil is notorious for spills and explosions that threaten oil workers, the surrounding community and the environment. An explosion at a BP refinery outside Houston in 2005 killed 15 workers and injured nearly 200. Regulators found BP responsible for willfully violating safety protocols, and enacted millions in fines. Four years later, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found 700 more violations, and enacted $87 million in fines for not correcting the violations that caused the explosion.
Another safety issue is that maintenance work, originally done by union members, is now being contracted out. Full-time union workers get health and safety training from both the company and the union. Lower-paid, contract workers do not.
And when workers either leave or retire, they are not replaced, forcing others to pick up the slack with overtime. “If they staffed this refinery, it would create 150-200 full-time jobs in our community,” said one striker.
So far, the strike has not seriously affected production as managers are operating the facilities. Letting anyone cross a strike picket line is a sure loss. The best way to guarantee that the sites are closed is for the workers and their supporters to occupy them. This would up the ante and expose the media, cops, courts and politicians as hired hands of the oil industry.
It could rally the support of workers and youth as we recently saw around the issue of racist police terror. It could begin to lead thousands of workers and youth off the treadmill of legal reform and onto the road to communist revolution. We aren’t holding our breath for the USW leadership to choose that path.