BP Oil Disaster response workers are reporting endemic problems, such as not being paid on time, low morale, rampant sickness, equipment failures, and being lied to regularly.[...]
“People are being laid off for no reason,” [a woman working as a clerk for Gulf Asphalt Contractors (GAC) said] , then went on to explain that people working on the beaches cleaning up oil “are getting sick, then they go to the emergency rooms, but they come back and we are always told it was because of food poisoning.”
“Everybody I know has bad morale and is confused and doesn’t know what is going on,” she continued, “Because I work in the TRG trailer, people come to me thinking I know more than they know, but I don’t. I’m coming up with shorter hours, and having to wait weeks to be paid. They shorted me 12 hours three checks ago, then when they finally paid me for it, they paid me at a lower wage.”
[...]
Truthout [...] spoke with a worker in the so-called Vessels of Opportunity program. The program is what BP set up to hire fisherman who are out of work because of the oil disaster, so that they are paid to use their boats in the response effort to do things like laying out oil boom and skimming. [Ed: see this post]
“They’re leaving gaps between the booms, and the oil is going straight through them,” the man, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Truthout in Lafitte, Louisiana, “This is on top of the fact that the booms don’t work anyway. The oil is going over and under them.”[...] He told Truthtout that the small plastic booms that BP is using to stop the oil from reaching the marsh areas “are a waste of time and money. Some company is making lots of money off of this, when in reality they need booms that are five feet tall above the water with at least a six-foot deep skirt under the water. What they have now is a load of crap.”
After pausing to look out at the water, he added, “Somebody is getting filthy ass rich off these red and yellow booms that don’t do shit. Some politicians’ got a buddy manufacturing that crap.”
[...]
He said that as the water warms later in the day, oil on the bottom that has been sunk by dispersants begins to “float back up to the surface, like a lava lamp.” According to the worker, “It smells like strong chemicals, you can tell it’s harmful.”
His voice was hoarse and he had a sore throat that he said was likely because of his working in the oil/dispersants.
The worker explained that he took the job because he needs the money, “since they killed our fishing season, what else was I going to do?”
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