BP Workers III – Trained for Dangers

Essay by auekwereUniversity, Master'sA+, September 2014

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Case Study 4

BP Workers III - Trained for Dangers

Allison Ekwere

Professor Dianne Dinkel

M603: Making Ethical Management Decisions

August 8, 2014

Introduction

Am I trained for danger? The majority of the workers at Texas City refinery would unfortunately have to reply, "No." The extremely unfortunate event that took place in March 2005, made it exceedingly evident, through investigation, that a lack of knowledge among workers, supervisors, and managers was the predominant cause of this disaster (Belli, 2007). Was the event preventable? Was BP intentionally ignoring all the safety concerns taking place in their organization? Was profit the only focus for BP? Throughout this paper, I will discuss BP's attitude towards its workers, the corporate worldview perceptions about BP's worker safety practices and BP's attitude compared to biblical and historical ethics.

An Attitude That Ignores

BP's attitude towards its employees is a negative one. BP was indifferent to all the safety issues taking place in their employees work environment.

High-level management, such as executives, was well informed about of the issues at hand; they just refused to be proactive in resolving the predicaments. They received documents explaining how cost cutting had compromised the safety in the refinery years before the incident in 2005, took place. In addition, training was cut from around 30 in 1997, to 8 in 2004, while also fixed costs being cut to approximately 25% from 1998 to 2004 (Mac Sheoin, 2010). The cutbacks lead to workers handling faulty equipment, untrained supervisors, not fully capable to instruct others effectively, and lead to countless safety incidents. BP failed to make certain that their actions of reducing costs did not intentionally harm their employees. BP balanced out the positive outcome, saving money, against the negative outcome, less training and a poor safety environment, which is immoral and not...