Oil and gas explosions account for thousands of worker deaths worldwide. In Algeria, where oil and gas production is the leading industry, a 2004 explosion at a liquefied natural gas plant in the port city of Skikda killed 27 workers and shut down a nearby oil refinery for weeks.

		USW health and safety experts Kim Nibarger (left) and Glenn Erwin traveled to Algeria to train oil and gas workers about the union role in ensuring a safe workplace.

Soon after the opening of the Solidarity Center’s office in Algeria, two health and safety experts from the United Steelworkers union (USW) traveled to Skikda to train leaders of the Algerian National Federation of Petroleum, Gas, and Chemical Workers on unions’ role in ensuring a safe work environment.

The USW represents more than 30,000 oil and gas workers in the United States and has ties to unions in several countries. Trainers Glenn Erwin and Kim Nibarger are part of the USW’s Triangle of Prevention, a union-led, management-supported health and safety system that applies a systematic approach to investigating incidents, both “near misses” and after the fact. TOP’s primary goal is to fix the workplace, not the worker, eliminating the hazard itself through better engineering or design. As lead investigators into a March 2005 explosion at a British Petroleum plant in Texas City, TX, that killed 15 contract workers, Erwin and Nibarger determined that faulty equipment maintenance, not employee error, had caused the fire.

Twenty-five workers initially enrolled in the USW/Solidarity Center health and safety program. When workers learned that experts from the infamous Texas City investigation were in town, the group swelled to 57, including 11 women, engineers from the Energy Ministry, and representatives of Sonatrach, the government-owned company that controls Algeria’s oil and gas resources.

Challenged with determining the root causes of a number of real-life incidents, such as the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, participants launched themselves into debate, analysis, questioning, and problem solving. By the end of the training, there was a unanimous sense that unions have a serious role to play at each stage of the oil refining process — in mitigating risks, raising the alarm, and ultimately protecting workers and their communities from large-scale disasters. The Solidarity Center, the USW, and the Algerian Federation hope to build on this first workshop, train more Algerian trainers in the TOP methodology, and create lasting relationships.