by Mike Hall, Feb 5, 2008

It may be Super Tuesday, but there’s a lot more than primary returns on TV tonight: PBS stations are offering a fascinating and harrowing look at how a corporate agenda that included slashing jobs and ever-increasing production in pursuit of profits made an already dangerous industry even more deadly.

At 9 p.m. EDT (check local listings), PBS will re-air “Dangerous Business,” the FRONTLINE and The New York Times joint investigation of McWane Corp.’s iron pipe foundries. From 1995 through 2003, more than 4,500 workers were injured and nine killed on the job at McWane Corp. foundries. The company amassed more health and safety violations than its six major competitors combined.

Since “Dangerous Business” was first shown five years ago, federal prosecutors obtained indictments against and juries convicted the company in five cases in four states for violation of health and safety and environmental laws.

The most recent conviction came in 2006, when a federal jury found four managers of the McWane-owned Atlantic States Cast Iron Pipe Co. guilty of conspiring to evade workplace safety and environmental laws by lying to regulators, tampering with evidence and bullying employees into silence about dangerous working conditions, according to The New York Times.

Prosecution witnesses, including several former foundry supervisors, depicted a brutal and dangerous workplace at Atlantic States, in Phillipsburg, N.J. They told of rigged smokestack tests, of polluted wastewater dumped under cover of night, of regulators stalled at the front gate while flagrant safety violations were hidden. Workers, they said, were blamed for accidents even when shoddy equipment or inadequate training was the real cause. Prosecutors called it “the McWane way.”

Tonight’s broadcast will include an update. Click here for a preview and read more on FRONTLINE’s website at PBS. Click here to read The New York Times series.

A tip of the hat to Jordan Barab at the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee for alerting us to the rebroadcast. Jordan is the founder of the late, great workplace safety and health blog, Confined Space.

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