Don't IBM employees undergo new-employee orientation where they are told about the chemicals they are working with and how properly to handle them? Are there no material safety data sheets readily available in clearly marked locations that they can refer to for the proper handling methods for said chemicals as required by law? Aren't there regular safety meetings and safety audits? Aren't there preventive maintenance systems in place to routinely check systems and detect failures before they occur? How are accidents or employee complaints tracked for effective elimination of any workplace hazards? And why are ventilation systems allowed to function if they leak hazardous vapors into the work environment? That's a design or implementation problem of the affected piece of equipment and would not be permitted to run in any of our facilities. And as for 90 percent recirculated air in a clean room, that's far too much. We use anywhere from 20 to 30 percent fresh incoming air in our clean rooms.
If employees are experiencing acid burns, dizziness, sinus problems, etc., and are dutifully reporting them, these events must all be thoroughly investigated and resolved to the satisfaction of the employee unions or factory representatives using proven, cost-effective solutions.
Occasionally, we have found that an employee may not be taking the necessary time to properly use the correct safety equipment, and training is modified or reinforced as required. Repeated accidents from the same employee could result in termination. Who wants to work with someone who cannot follow instructions and endangers the rest of his or her crew? And in today's litigious society, any company that doesn't ensure that its employees follow proper safety precautions is asking for problems.
Articles like yours do nothing but scare people about manufacturing in the high-tech sector. IBM, the topic of this article, may have been lax in its enforcement of what surely must be documented safety procedures and that needs to be addressed and corrected, with restitution paid if need be. But to tell the public that these people work in environments where their work clothes are routinely soiled by hazardous chemicals because clean-room suits don't protect them is doing a disservice to your readers. In a properly run manufacturing environment with the right emphasis on safety, employee empowerment and proper training (and retraining), there's no reason that workplace safety should be compromised. (Personally, I'm not comfortable in bunny suits, but people tell me they get used to them in time. I do enjoy the air in our clean rooms, however. Those HEPA filters remove all pollens and the air inside with its controlled humidity feels wonderful.)
If these allegations are true, there is certainly a problem at IBM. But don't blame the clean-room suits or the chemicals or their manufacturers! I do not believe this story is telling of the industry as a whole but, rather, is picking up on some very real and terrifying neglect that is most certainly the exception.
For the record, I am employed as a quality engineer with Wacker Siltronic, currently on assignment at the parent company in Burghausen, Germany.
-- Tom Nagy
Clean-room air is polluted because management keeps the fresh-air ventilation systems turned off (or down) to save money on heating and air conditioning bills. Air is free, but fresh outside air brought into a 70-degree clean room gets heated or air-conditioned at great expense to the corporation and its stockholders. No plant manager is going to throw out great volumes of expensively conditioned, polluted air if he can get away with recirculating it back into the work environment. The money saved is all profit. Employees who question this practice get fired. Should a government investigator come to make an inspection, it's no problem to turn the ventilation system on for the duration of his visit.
I briefly lived through just that situation a few years back while working in the clean room of a local compact disc factory. It was both amusing and sad to watch management create an "illusion of safety" by sponsoring safety mascot contests and focusing attention on comparatively trivial safety matters while at the same time withholding material safety data sheets, intimidating employees who wore gas masks and, in general, keeping employees in the dark concerning the major real hazard of the solvent vapors trapped in our production rooms. Everything was done to draw attention away from the fumes in the work environment. Asking "Will you please turn up the exhausts?" was all it took to jeopardize one's employment.
One final lesson: "Government protection" isn't. Good luck getting any objective support from the government. Once snowed, the primary mission of a government labor or safety agency is self-preservation, not a safe work environment. A complainant will be flushed down the toilet before the government will admit to botched investigations. Laborers' only hope in these situations is to form unions to fight for fresh air in their work environments. If they don't succeed, they'll end up like those workers in Scotland, getting cancer at 39 years of age.
-- Anonymous
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