Portside

The Impact Plastics factory in rural Erwin, Tennessee, is located just a few hundred feet from the Nolichucky River. The company, founded in 1987, manufactures plastic injection molded components for original equipment manufacturers at the Erwin plant, located in the aptly named Riverview Industrial Park. Only a parking lot and two roads separate the workplace from the river.

Yet the flooding in Erwin led to a particular tragedy, the blame for which Impact Plastics workers pin on their employer: workers were inside the plant that day, and in the hurricane’s immediate wake, six were missing. In the days since, the families of two of those six — Bertha Mendoza and Lidia Verdugo, both Mexican citizens — have confirmed that their loved ones died in the flood.

According to the factory’s workers, they were told to report to work that day despite the imminent natural disaster.

Jacob Ingram, a mold changer at Impact Plastics, told the Knoxville News Sentinel that even as the water rose outside, managers wouldn’t let employees leave, instead telling them to move their cars away from the rising floodwater. Ingram said he moved his car twice.

“They should’ve evacuated when we got the flash flood warnings, and when they saw the parking lot,” Ingram said. “When we moved our cars, we should’ve evacuated then . . . we asked them if we should evacuate, and they told us not yet, it wasn’t bad enough. By the time it was bad enough, it was too late.”

Robert “Robby” Jarvis, a plant worker, told NBC News that employees “were all in panic mode” because “the water came up so fast and . . . we had nowhere to go. We had nowhere to go!”

Impact Plastics, Inc. has denied that management told workers that they would be fired if they left the facility that day, with Gerald O’Connor, the company’s founder, stating, “We are devastated by the tragic loss of great employees. Those who are missing or deceased, and their families, are in our thoughts and prayers.”

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is now investigating the company at the direction of the local district attorney. The state’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has opened its own probe into the company. In announcing the investigation late Wednesday, the agency noted that companies have eight hours to report a workplace death, and it hadn’t yet received a fatality report from Impact Plastics.

In There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster — Who Profits and Who Pays the Price, journalist Jessie Singer traces how workplace deaths first declined with the creation of workers’ compensation, i.e., when on-the-job injuries began to cost employers money. The spread of unionization further reduced these rates, for an obvious reason: unions give workers a say at work, a means of negotiating over unsafe conditions and protecting those who refuse to risk their health and safety for the boss’s sake. The decline in union power, and the plunging rate of strikes (many of which were once waged in response to unsafe conditions) has in turn coincided with a rise in workplace injuries.

Writes Singer, “You can always point out a danger in the built environment, even a jumbo-sized danger, but an accident will be a predictable result if no one listens to you.”

_{A van flows in floodwaters near the Biltmore Village in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on September 28, 2024, in Asheville, North Carolina. Photo: Sean Rayford} 

None of which is to say that a union at Impact Plastics would have been guaranteed to stop management from calling workers into the factory on Friday or keeping them there as the waters rose. But it is hard to imagine any union worth its salt allowing such decisions to go unchallenged.

They will fire you for taking an approved weeks in advance day off. Absolutely worst pay I have ever seen. People that have been working here 15 years plus not even making 13 dollars an hour. Health benefits for a family of 4 would cost more that the employee makes for a 2 week period. Not worth the hassle or time to work at this place. The owner makes millions while not paying his employees that make him those millions. Don’t work here.

Workplace deaths in the United States were up in 2022, the last year in which data is available. That year, there were 5,486 fatal work injuries recorded, a 5.7 percent increase from 5,190 in 2021. The number amounts to 3.7 fatalities per 100,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) workers, up from 3.6 in 2021. That means one person died every ninety-six minutes from a work-related injury in 2022. Foreign-born Hispanic or Latino workers accounted for 63.5 percent (792) of total Hispanic or Latino worker fatalities (1,248). The deaths of Mendoza and Verdugo, and possibly more of the still-missing Impact Plastics employees, will be recorded in that category for the 2024 numbers. As the climate continues to change, such deadly workplace tragedies will only increase.

While some of the reviews of Impact Plastics on Indeed are positive, others, also written before this week, echo the complaints about forced overtime and low pay, with numerous references to “greedy management.” Then there is the most recent review, written on October 1: “Will get you killed in a hurricane by ignoring all weather reports and forcing you to stay under threat of losing your job. There is no work life balance when work takes your life.”