January 8, 2003

At a Texas Foundry, an Indifference to Life

By DAVID BARSTOW and LOWELL BERGMAN
Additional reporting by James Sandler and Robin Stein.

TYLER, Tex. — It is said that only the desperate seek work at Tyler Pipe, a sprawling, rusting pipe foundry out on Route 69, just past the flea market.

Behind a high metal fence lies a workplace that is part Dickens and part Darwin, a dim, dirty, hellishly hot place where men are regularly disfigured by amputations and burns, where turnover is so high that convicts are recruited from local prisons, where some workers urinate in their pants because their bosses refuse to let them step away from the manufacturing line for even a few moments.

Rolan Hoskin was from the ranks of the desperate. His life was a tailspin of unemployment, debt and divorce. A master electrician, 48 years old, he had retreated to a low-rent apartment on the outskirts of town and taken an entry-level maintenance job on the graveyard shift at Tyler Pipe.

He would come home covered in fine black soot, utterly drained and dreading the next shift. "I don't know if I'm going to last another week," his twin brother recalls him saying. The job scared him; he didn't know what he was doing. But the pay was decent, almost $10 an hour, and his electricity was close to being cut off. "He was just trying to make it," his daughter said. On June 29, 2000, in his second month on the job, Mr. Hoskin descended into a deep pit under a huge molding machine and set to work on an aging, balky conveyor belt that carried sand. Federal rules require safety guards on conveyor belts to prevent workers from getting caught and crushed. They also require belts to be shut down when maintenance is done on them.

But this belt was not shut down, federal records show. Nor was it protected by metal safety guards. That very night, Mr. Hoskin had been trained to adjust the belt while it was still running. Less downtime that way, the men said. Now it was about 4 a.m., and Mr. Hoskin was alone in the cramped, dark pit. The din was deafening, the footing treacherous under heavy drifts of black sand.

He was found on his knees. His left arm had been crushed first, the skin torn off. His head had been pulled between belt and rollers. His skull had split. "If he fought that machine I know his last thought was me," said his daughter, April Hoskin-Silva, her dark eyes rimmed with tears. It was not just a conveyor belt that claimed Mr. Hoskin's life that warm summer night. He also fell victim to a way of doing business that has produced vast profits and, as the plant's owners have admitted in federal court, deliberate indifference to the safety of workers at Tyler Pipe.

Mr. Hoskin worked for McWane Inc., a privately held company based in Birmingham, Ala., that owns Tyler Pipe and is one of the world's largest manufacturers of cast-iron sewer and water pipe. It is also one of the most dangerous employers in America, according to a nine-month examination by The New York Times, the PBS television program "Frontline" and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Since 1995, at least 4,600 injuries have been recorded in McWane foundries, many hundreds of them serious ones, company documents show. Nine workers, including Mr. Hoskin, have been killed. McWane plants, which employ about 5,000 workers, have been cited for more than 400 federal health and safety violations, far more than their six major competitors combined.

No McWane executive would be interviewed on the record. But in a series of written responses, the company's president, G. Ruffner Page, acknowledged "serious mistakes" and expressed deep regret for Mr. Hoskin's death. "Our intensified focus on safety speaks to lessons learned," he wrote. At the same time, he sought to explain and strongly defend the company's business methods.

"Over the years, McWane has grown by the acquisition of troubled companies that had become uncompetitive," he wrote. "Through substantial investment in new plant and equipment and more disciplined management practices, McWane transformed these underperforming companies into efficient and viable operations." Disciplined management, he said, has allowed McWane to stave off foreign competitors who have no regard for safety.

In the last decade, many American corporations have embraced such a vision of capitalism — cutting costs, laying off workers and pressing those who remain to labor harder, longer and more efficiently. But top federal and state regulators say McWane has taken this idea to the extreme. Describing the company's business, they use the words "lawless" and "rogue."

The company's managers call it "the McWane way." The story of Tyler Pipe, drawn from company and government documents and interviews with dozens of current and former workers and managers, is a case study in the application of the McWane way. It is the anatomy of a workplace where, federal officials and employees say, nearly everything — safety programs, environmental controls, even the smallest federally mandated precautions that might have kept Rolan Hoskin alive — has been subordinated to production, to the commandment to keep the pipe rolling off the line. Federal safety inspectors tried to make a difference. They cited and fined and cajoled. But for years, records show, little changed. "You put people at risk," a former senior plant manager at Tyler Pipe said. "We did every day." Which is why even now the toughest of Tyler Pipe veterans remember the day McWane came to town as the day they were, as one of them put it, "kicked into hell."

Introducing `the McWane Way´

Tyler, a city of 85,000 an hour and a half's drive east of Dallas, began as a stagecoach town, but it came of age around two precious commodities, East Texas crude and some of the finest roses on earth. Oil and roses still help define Tyler, or at least a certain conjured Tyler. The municipal rose garden alone has 38,000 bushes, and the old oil families still carry clout.

But by the early 90's, the shuttered storefronts down by the county courthouse explained why local leaders were so endlessly worried about the care and nurturing of Tyler's contemporary crown jewels — the Kelly-Springfield tire plant, two air-conditioner factories and Tyler Pipe. These big manufacturers, they knew, represented something extremely valuable and increasingly rare: places where someone with a high school diploma and a strong back could make $15 an hour, where a Mexican immigrant with little English could firmly grasp the next rung.

The pipe foundry occupies several hundred acres northwest of downtown. Its smokestacks rise high above a north and south plant, each with its own cupola, a multistory furnace that melts tons of scrap metal to produce smoky white rivers of molten iron. The molten iron is poured into spinning cylinders to form pipes, into molds of packed black sand to make fittings.

The company would not let a reporter tour the plant. But employees describe simply stepping inside as an overwhelming experience. First is the heat, wave upon wave of it, sometimes in excess of 130 degrees. Then there is the noise — of pipe slamming into pipe, of pneumatic tools that grind and cut, of massive machines that shudder and shake, of honking forklifts and roaring exhaust systems. Dust and fumes choke the lungs and coat the lights, leaving the plant floor a spectral labyrinth of glowing pipes and blackened machinery.

In the early 90's, Tyler Pipe employed about 2,800 people and did about $200 million in business a year. It was modestly profitable, and the owners, the Tyler Corporation, were conventionally paternalistic. They distributed turkeys at Christmas and door prizes at the annual employee barbecue. Regulators said the plant, while far from perfect, made an effort to comply with safety and environmental rules. In late 1995, the Tyler Corporation sold the foundry to McWane. In one stroke, McWane had bought one of its main rivals and acquired its largest plant.

Within weeks, senior executives flew in from Birmingham and set about executing a plan of stunning audacity: Over the next two years, they cut nearly two-thirds of the employees, yet insisted that production continue apace. They eliminated quality control inspectors and safety inspectors, pollution control personnel and relief workers, cleaning crews and maintenance workers.

"It got pretty bad," recalled Kevin Fowler, the human resources manager from 1996 to 1999. "If I walked into a department people would wonder if I was coming with their termination." Alarmed by the layoffs, city leaders sought meetings with McWane executives. Their requests were rebuffed. "They just disassociated themselves from the city," Thomas G. Mullins, the chamber of commerce president, recalled. To keep up production, McWane eliminated one of three shifts; instead of three shifts of eight hours, there were two 12-hour shifts. At the end of a shift, supervisors often marched through yelling, "Four more hours!" So employees worked 16-hour days, sometimes seven days a week. Men who operated one machine were ordered to operate three. Breaks were allowed only if a relief worker was available, but McWane had reduced the number of relief workers and forbade supervisors to fill in for hourly workers. The policy hit hardest near iron-pouring stations, where workers had to drink plenty of fluids to withstand the heat. The humiliating result, six workers said in separate interviews, was that men were sometimes forced to urinate in their pants or risk heat exhaustion.

Even the most basic amenities did not survive. The barbecues and 401(k) plan were easy enough targets. But items like soap, medicated skin cream and hand towels were eliminated from the plant stockroom as unnecessary "luxuries," company records show. If they were available at all, they had to be specially ordered with approval from top managers.

Several workers said they were told by their bosses to bring their own toilet tissue. Near the cupola, managers rationed crushed ice for the workers' drinks, company records show. Out by the loading docks, they eliminated portable heaters used by forklift drivers to warm up in winter. "We do not provide comfort heat for individual employees," Dick Stoker, the works manager, explained in a memorandum.

Restrictions were placed on safety equipment. Protective aprons, safety boots and face shields were no longer stocked and readily available. Heavy, heat-resistant $17 gloves were replaced by $2 cloth ones. As a result, workers wrapped their hands in duct tape to protect from burns. The union was helpless to resist, past and current leaders agree. Organized labor had never been a potent force at Tyler Pipe, and the layoffs devastated the union's membership. The contract barred strikes, permitted 16-hour days and let breaks be canceled.

"My hands was tied," said Bobby Hopson, former president of Local 1157 of the United Steelworkers of America.

Morale plummeted, but profits soared. Senior managers say they were told that Tyler Pipe earned more than $50 million in 1996 — double the reported profits for the five-year period before McWane arrived.

Four years after the takeover, inspectors from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration spent several days taking the measure of the new regime. They found more than 150 safety hazards. They found poorly maintained equipment. They found a work force that was poorly trained, ill equipped, overworked. "Throughout the plant, molten metal is seen spilling from the cupolas, bulls and ladles," their report said. "The forklift trucks transport the metal, and the ground behind the trucks often smokes with puddles of molten metal. Workers are covered with black residue from the foundry sand. Many work areas are dark, due to poor lighting and clouds of sand. Despite all the ignition and fuel sources, exit paths are not obvious. Many workers have scars or disfigurations which are noticeable from several feet away. Burns and amputations are frequent.

"This facility is located in a relatively small town where jobs are not plentiful. Throughout the plant, in supervisors' offices and on bulletin boards, next to production charts and union memos, is posted in big orange letters: REDUCE MAN HOURS PER TON."

Talking Safety, Walking Danger

Any foundry is filled with dangers seen and unseen. For three of the last four years, the cast-iron foundry industry has recorded the nation's highest injury rates. But the inspectors said they were drawn to Tyler Pipe because its rate was so much higher than the industry average, records show. Even with far fewer workers at Tyler in 1996 than in 1995, more workdays were lost because of injuries, records show.

On paper, the company emphasized safety. "You are expected to work efficiently and as quickly as possible without compromising safety rules or safe practices in any way," the employee handbook states.

But inspectors and workers alike called the safety program a charade. "In essence, they are doing it in `form´ but not with substance," the inspectors wrote.

The company prepared extensive written safety rules. But even the most senior supervisors let employees work in clear violation of those rules, the inspectors found. And while the company promised twice-a-week safety inspections, the same hazards showed up week after week. Ultimately, the inspectors wrote, it came down to incentives: "They have never developed a mechanism to hold supervisors accountable for safety while, on the other hand, they have mastered a system for holding supervisors accountable for production downtime." Shutting down machines, taking special precautions before entering dangerous pits, putting safety guards on, taking them off — all these safety measures "lengthened the `downtime´ taking away from production activities," OSHA inspectors wrote.

It was Elena Glasscock's job to make sure supervisors gave their workers proper safety training. But many supervisors were simply overwhelmed by production demands, she said. What little training they did offer was lost on Tyler Pipe's many Hispanic workers who spoke little English.

"I would ask the supervisor, if this person could not speak English, how did he know what the work instruction said?" she recalled. Last summer, after 28 years at Tyler Pipe, she resigned in disgust.

Experienced workers left in droves. Many were fired under a new "no fault" attendance policy that assessed points for each sick day and half points for arriving late or leaving early. Ten points resulted in dismissal. Others quit because of sudden demotions and pay cuts. Mr. Fowler, the personnel director, said he quit because he tired of being seen as a "monster."

New employees are called "pumpkin heads" because of the orange hard hats they must wear, and each week waves of pumpkin heads arrived. But it was not until pumpkin heads started showing up with electronic monitoring bracelets that people realized the company was recruiting at Texas prisons. Many of the newly released prisoners did not last. They worked up to 16 hours a day, sometimes for 14 days straight, then were fired or quit before they qualified for benefits or union protection.

According to interviews and company documents, turnover at times approached 100 percent. Many rookie employees got hurt and left. It was a vicious cycle: injuries fueled turnover; turnover fueled injuries.

The plant was filled with workers who barely knew their way around, let alone grasped the dangers they faced. In April 1996, a crew of outside contract workers was sent up onto the roof to clean gutters. One worker, Juan Jimenez, stepped through a skylight and plunged 55 feet to his death. Mr. Page said that Tyler Pipe's safety director had pointed out the skylight to Mr. Jimenez, but OSHA inspectors said the death "could have been avoided" if the skylight had safety rails as required under OSHA rules. In interviews, dozens of workers said the unrelenting pressure to make production quotas resulted in dangerous shortcuts. Bobby Hopson's younger brother, Jerry, a 54-year-old father of two, took a shortcut in May 1996. His maintenance crew had finished work on a production line and, hurrying to get out of the way, cut through a molding machine. The line started up, and Jerry Hopson was crushed by a hydraulic piston. A year later, after more than 20 operations, he died. "He was just a swell feller," his brother, the former union president, said, brushing back tears. In the local paper, a plant executive had called Jerry Hopson "a good man who made a very big mistake." But Bobby Hopson insisted that senior supervisors were well aware of the shortcut and its hazards, yet made no effort to stop its use.

"If you lose a minute, you've already lost, you know, maybe a fitting or two," he said.

Losing Limbs but Not Pipes

On Jan. 22, 1997, another maintenance worker, Ira Cofer, descended alone into a machine pit. "Downsizing had ended the earlier practice of entering the pits with a buddy," OSHA investigators later wrote. When Mr. Cofer's sleeve snagged in an unguarded conveyor belt, he struggled desperately to free himself. It was nearly three hours before his screams were heard.

"Eyewitnesses said that the friction of the belt had sanded his arm away, so that even his elbow joint was worn smooth and flat," investigators wrote.

Mr. Cofer's arm had to be amputated. "I was mad for a while, then I was praying," he said of the ordeal. "There was nothing there but the Lord."

In their accident report, plant managers put the blame squarely on Mr. Cofer: "Keep hand away from belt and do not work alone," they wrote. Within months, four more maintenance workers suffered amputation injuries at Tyler Pipe. In 1999, OSHA cited the plant for 31 instances of inadequate guarding on machines. By 2000, according to OSHA, 60 percent of the north plant's 70 maintenance workers had been hurt. Senior managers knew all this, OSHA records show. They knew that guards were frequently left off for weeks at a time. They knew that maintenance mechanics were working on running conveyor belts, entering treacherous machine pits alone. And so in June 2000, Rolan Hoskin, afraid of the job but too desperate for work to quit, took his turn in the pit.

His death prompted Mr. Stoker, the works manager, to issue a memorandum. "WE WILL NOT PUT PRODUCTION AHEAD OF SAFETY," he wrote. "If that means that we lose a couple of pieces of pipe or fittings to do the job in a safe manner, so be it. Then we need to figure out how to recover the lost production safely."

But in a memorandum dated Aug. 2, an engineering manager raised serious concerns about safety. He called for a potentially costly program to build new safety guards. "We are not in compliance on most if not all our belt conveyors," he warned. In response, he received a dismissive letter from the human resources manager.

Burn the Tires, Scrub the Toilet

McWane's senior executives, including C. Phillip McWane, the chairman and chief executive, received regular reports from all their plants. The reports measured seemingly everything — injuries, lost work hours, dismissals, operating margins. By 2000, it was clear that Tyler Pipe had become an exceedingly profitable enterprise. It was also clear that something was very wrong. Red flags were everywhere.

There had been three deaths since the takeover. The injury rate was climbing, the company's own reports showed. "Safety is without a doubt one of our worst areas," Mr. Stoker wrote in a confidential memorandum to top supervisors. "I have failed in this area, but I can promise you that we will not fail to improve in this area come 2001."

Meanwhile, the plant had been deemed an "E.P.A. High Priority Violator," and company lawyers were recommending steps to forestall a criminal inquiry of its environmental record, company records show.

After the takeover, Tyler Pipe's environmental department was virtually wiped out, several current and former employees said. One former senior manager said that when he arrived in 2000, he found an environmental program "in the Dark Ages."

"It was not humanly possible for one person to handle all of the environmental issues at a plant of that size," he recalled.

In March of that year, state environmental investigators spent several days at Tyler Pipe. They found that the plant had failed to keep inspections records, to get required permits and to maintain pollution controls and wastewater treatment lagoons. The list ran on and on. Now, with federal regulators lurking, Mr. Stoker told his staff, "We are so far out of compliance at Tyler Pipe that I cannot begin to cover our needs in this letter."

Even so, in a January 2001 memorandum, senior McWane executives outlined an environmental upgrade at Tyler Pipe and several other plants that was relatively low cost — outside audits, better training, improved manuals, an annual company environmental conference.

Before long, the company's stated desire for "environmental excellence" was tested in a small way. The question was what to do with a pile of 200 old tires. It would have cost about $750 to have them hauled away to a hazardous waste dump. But company documents show that Mr. Stoker had another solution, even though he had been told that it violated state air-quality laws. "He wanted the tires burned and he wanted them burned now," an internal company document stated. And so they were, in the cupola. Buckets of contaminated grease disappeared the same way, workers said.

The biggest worries, though, had to do with safety. Texas workers' compensation laws give McWane broad immunity from negligence lawsuits. But they also required it to pay medical bills and lost wages for injured workers. Company executives complained that they were "hemorrhaging" money on workers' compensation — many millions of dollars a year and rising. Once again, the company chose a minimalist approach, according to company and OSHA records and former safety and health employees. It devised a system of "workers' compensation cost control techniques" that shifted responsibility for safety problems onto the workers themselves. It was a system that assumed widespread fraud and often subjected workers reporting injuries to disciplinary action, and sometimes firing, for violating safety rules.

"Whether the employee is 100 percent or 5 percent at fault is irrelevant," wrote Stephen A. Smith, then president of the McWane subsidiary that owns Tyler Pipe.

In 2000 and 2001, company records show, more than 350 workers were subjected to disciplinary actions — known as D.A.'s — after reporting injuries. "All disciplines short of termination is administered with the intent and purpose to teach," the plant's employee handbook explained. But OSHA inspectors concluded that the system was used not to teach but to punish. Disciplinary action was meted out if it was the fault of the employee or not, they said.

"The true significance of a D.A. is that they move an employee along a track for termination," the inspectors wrote. Even longtime employees with exemplary work records could be fired for a single D.A. Employees say they learned to keep injuries a secret whenever possible.

In his response, the McWane president, Mr. Page, said no Tyler Pipe worker had been fired in retaliation for reporting an injury. He said managers were encouraged to enforce safety rules "so that there would be no doubt about management's commitment to the safety program." He added, "No judge or jury has ever concluded that Tyler Pipe acted improperly."

As many companies do, McWane insists that injured workers return to work as soon as possible on "modified duty." Mr. Page described modified duty as a beneficial program that speeded recovery. At Tyler Pipe, though, records and interviews show that modified duty often meant humiliating and punitive jobs like cleaning toilets.

John T. Combs was the senior manager who oversaw modified duty. In an internal company e-mail message, he extolled the benefits of assigning injured workers to toilet duty and described how he assigned "an aggressive, physically imposing supervisor" to oversee them. "This accomplished one of two things," he wrote. "1) the employees would return to work because cleaning toilets is not fun and it paid less than their regular job or 2) they would quit."

Mr. Combs did not respond to telephone messages. Around town, Tyler Pipe was approaching pariah status. "You know what the saying in the community is?" a county commissioner asked at a commission meeting in 2001. "That if you can't work anywhere else, go to work at Tyler Pipe." With a work force that had crept up to about 1,200, company records showed there were more than 900 new hires in 2001.

That December, a group of employees composed an unsigned letter to Mr. Page. It began: "On behalf of the employees of Tyler Pipe Company . . . Please Help!"

`We Do Not Send Flowers´

Michelle Sankowsky, a nurse, was hired in January 2002 as Tyler Pipe's occupational health and compensation manager. It was a new position, overseeing all workers' compensation cases. She met daily with Boyd T. Collier III, the human resources manager, and other senior executives. She quit after four months, she said, because she concluded that the company routinely targeted injured workers for dismissal.

"You've got to understand," she said. "The mentality is that if it weren't for people looking for a free ride, looking for the paid vacations, if it wasn't for the malingerers, if it wasn't for the fakers, if it wasn't for people being careless and reckless, then they wouldn't have the numbers."

Ms. Sankowsky said she suggested a variety of low-cost ideas to reduce rampant ergonomic complaints. She proposed conducting warm-up exercises and wrapping brush handles in foam. "Not cost effective," she says she was told. In Texas, injured workers have the right to choose their own doctors. At Tyler Pipe, this right came with an important qualification. "We require every employee injured at work to see the company-approved physician if a doctor is necessary," the employee handbook says. "NO EXCEPTIONS!" The labor contract said the same. In a memorandum to all workers, Mr. Collier said he wanted injured workers to see the company doctor first to "ensure the very best care in Smith County for our employees."

Ms. Sankowsky sees it differently. "It all boiled down to that they wanted to be in control," she said. Controlling the care, she said, was viewed as the key to saving money and reducing injury numbers reported to OSHA. And the key to controlling the care, she said, was Occu-Safe, a tiny medical company hired in 1999 to run the plant dispensary and care for injured workers at its downtown clinic.

Occu-Safe was an unlikely choice for the job. Established only months before, it had no track record and few other clients. It was owned by Mike Adams, whose prior business experience, court records show, included a bankrupt air-conditioning venture. In an interview, Mr. Adams said he won the contract by promising deep reductions in workers' compensation claims. Mr. Adams also shared Tyler Pipe's skepticism about injury claims; he says he believes that up to 50 percent are fraudulent, and that "overutilization" of doctors is a "huge problem." At his clinic, he said, doctors are under strict orders to avoid "hope so, think so, want so medicine."

Tyler Pipe was by far Mr. Adams's largest client, paying him $615,000 in 2001, records show, and Mr. Adams began most days discussing injury cases with Mr. Collier, the human resources manager. Occu-Safe, Ms. Sankowsky said, was simply too small to assert unbiased medical judgment. "One of the benefits of having Occu-Safe as your medical provider is that people were not taken off work," she said.

Mr. Adams denies that Mr. Collier has tried to influence medical decisions. "The day he does, I'll walk away," he said.

Still, records suggest that Occu-Safe was responsive to Mr. Collier. When a supervisor punctured his arm late one Friday night, emergency room doctors put him on Vicodin, a strong painkiller, and told him to stay off work a week. But according to internal e-mail, Mr. Collier wanted him back right away; Occu-Safe representatives ordered him to switch to a less potent drug and report to work on Tuesday. Workers who insisted on seeing their own doctors were assumed to be malingerers. It was called "jumping ship," and employees who did it, Ms. Sankowsky said, were targeted for disciplinary action and termination.

Mr. Collier's hostility toward outside doctors was apparent in an e-mail message on Feb. 19, 2002, to Ms. Sankowsky, who had asked about sending flowers to an employee who had had surgery for a workplace injury.

"Michelle: Typically we do not send flowers to hourly ee's," he wrote. "And the only time we send flowers to salaried ee's is death in the immediate family; I'd entertain a proposal to fund flowers for cases like Brian but we need to scope it very narrow so it didn't apply for cases that were referred by CARPENTER and his band of outlaws."

Mr. Collier was referring to Dr. Robert Carpenter, a chiropractor with union ties who has treated approximately 60 injured Tyler Pipe workers over the last two years. About 40 of them have since been fired, said Dr. Carpenter, who has filed a defamation suit against Mr. Collier. He said he no longer gets new patients who work at Tyler Pipe.

"If I was an injured worker, then I would think that perhaps I might get fired if I went to see Dr. Carpenter," he said.

A Broken Back and a Bass Boat

Marcos Lopez crossed the Mexican border and found work at Tyler Pipe at the age of 17. He was used to tough work, and he saw plenty of men get hurt. But nothing on earth, he said, prepared him for McWane.

"You reach this point that you just don't care about you," said Mr. Lopez, who is now 45. "And you set your mind on work. And that's what they want. And that's how people get hurt."

On March 2, 2002, it happened to him. He was working on some machinery, stretching awkwardly in a tight space, when he slipped and fell. His back slammed into metal. He heard a snap, he said, and felt dizzying waves of pain and nausea. In the dispensary, records show, he was pale and weeping and showing signs of shock. He said his pain — a "burning in the bone" — was so intense that it was a challenge just to breathe. Had he been sent to a hospital, had an X-ray been done, it would have been clear that Mr. Lopez had suffered a terrible injury, a severe compression fracture in his spine.

But he was not sent to a hospital. "They just tell me to sit down and wait for the safety man," he recalled. Ms. Sankowsky, in the dispensary that day, recalls that senior safety managers were deeply suspicious of Mr. Lopez. He had a prior back injury, in 2000. Worse still, he had "jumped ship" and been kept off work for months. Then, in questioning Mr. Lopez, the managers discovered that he had recently bought a bass boat. They found this highly significant, Ms. Sankowsky recalls. Might he be faking injury to get his boat paid off with disability insurance? When she argued that shock was difficult to fake, Ms. Sankowsky said, the safety manager brushed her aside: "Michelle, don't you think that you could sweat and cry a little bit if you thought you were going to get a free boat and paid vacation?"

Mr. Lopez was sent by van to the Occu-Safe clinic where, after a brief examination, he was given pain medicine and sent home, records show. The clinic doctor diagnosed a back strain and told the plant to expect Mr. Lopez back in three days. In fact, he was getting worse. He felt a creeping numbness in his legs and hands.

At Tyler Pipe, Ms. Sankowsky said, Mr. Collier and the safety managers were "really circling their wagons around Mr. Lopez, that he's a fraud, he's a fake, and, you know, we're going to get him before he gets us." At a meeting on March 13, the managers approved a plan to place Mr. Lopez under surveillance, corporate records show. The next day, on his third visit to Occu-Safe, Mr. Lopez asked for an X-ray. It showed a "bad compression fracture," medical records state. Still, he was sent home. Nobody informed him of the new findings, he said, and according to Ms. Sankowsky, this was deliberate.

"Why do you not tell this gentleman that he's got a compression fracture of the spine?" she said she asked an Occu-Safe manager. "And he said to me, `Well, then he´d know how hurt he was.´ " The clinic, she said, quietly began to explore the possibility that Mr. Lopez had cancer that had weakened his spine. Mr. Collier, she said, welcomed the news. "So we can deny the claim because it's cancer?" she recalls him asking. Mr. Collier declined to comment.

Finally, more than three weeks after his fall, Mr. Lopez was sent to a surgeon. "He said, `You´re one hair to be paralyzed for the rest of your life,´ " Mr. Lopez recalled. The doctor told him something else: his fracture had gotten worse since the accident.

It is when he says this that Mr. Lopez, a proud and reserved man, begins to weep. For months after the surgery, he said, he could not dress himself, or pick up the soap in the shower. "I feel destroyed," he said.

Mr. Adams would not discuss the case in detail; Mr. Lopez has sued Occu-Safe for malpractice. But Mr. Adams insisted that "Marcos got the care that he needed."

McWane kept Mr. Lopez under surveillance this year, determined to prove him a malingerer. In his response, Mr. Page said Mr. Lopez had been filmed "lifting heavy loads into his car" — proof, he said, that Mr. Lopez has not suffered any serious disability. A doctor for the Texas Workers Compensation Commission, however, recently determined that despite surgery and months of rehabilitation, Mr. Lopez has a permanent partial disability.

Epilogue

Last year, Tyler Pipe came under intense scrutiny from federal investigators.

In the summer, the company pleaded guilty in federal court to deliberately ignoring safety rules that could have saved Mr. Hoskin's life. In the fall, McWane reached a settlement with OSHA, admitting that it had willfully violated safety rules a dozen times.

Tyler Pipe began publishing a safety newsletter, As the Pipe Turns. The newsletter said many new safety guards had been installed and hundreds of potential hazards eliminated. Under a new incentive program, workers get gifts if they do not "have an OSHA recordable accident that results in discipline." One recent gift, a lunch cooler, was branded with this slogan: "Safety Without Compromise."

But Tyler Pipe remains a dangerous place to work, company records show. A recently completed internal safety audit found 1,219 hazards. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company