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During this period, Koch Industries changed the way people worked on factory floors across Georgia-Pacific. The company managed to cut the number of unionized workers in half, from 22,000 in 2005 to roughly 11,800 in 2016. This gave Koch flexibility and allowed it to avoid the type of onerous work rules that Charles Koch opposed since he took over the Pine Bend refinery in 1972. These changes were evident at Georgia-Pacific’s sprawling mill outside Savannah, one of the largest tissue and paper towel mills in the United States.
The mill was highly mechanized, and its cavernous interior was clean and pleasant to walk through. The space resembled an industrial Santa’s workshop; a complicated maze of automatic machines that rolled, spun, and packed countless rolls of toilet paper. Automated forklifts drove between the machines, guided by lasers beams aimed at the floor in front of them. Employees monitored the machines and fixed them when there was a problem. One of those employees was Dana Blocker, a muscular and intense man who had worked at Georgia-Pacific since the 1990s.
Until Koch bought the company, employees like Blocker had worked with specific job descriptions and were assigned to oversee specific machines. A person was a winder operator, for example, or a wrap operator, or a case pack operator. After Koch took over, those distinctions were dissolved. Blocker’s job title became “reliability technician,” meaning that he oversaw a wide variety of machines and processes.
“Now you’re a technician, expected to go out and run all the equipment on the line. So, no one is tied to one piece of equipment. You have to run the entire process,” Blocker said. “When people ask me now, what’s my job, what do I do? I run the entire line. I don’t have one specific job. Whatever needs to be done, that’s what you’re going to do.”
Blocker’s coworker, Mark Caldwell, said this created a new flexibility in the workforce. “You probably couldn’t tell who the manufacturing engineer is, or the mechanic, or the technician. You wouldn’t be able to distinguish who does what role, because we all flow to the work. We all do what needs to be done.”
Both men praised the new system. Blocker said that it helped foster teamwork and galvanized him to think like an entrepreneur rather than a simple factory hand. “That seemed to help everybody out. There’s no blaming or finger-pointing at anyone for running something a certain way. You’re all trying to help each other out to get the best product,” he said. Both men also emphasized that their managers encouraged them to shut machines down in the event of hazards. Safety came first.
While unions seemed stubborn in clinging to work rules and job designations, the tradition of doing so traced its roots back to unsafe working conditions in the early 1900s. Being confined to a certain job helped workers reinforce their expertise not just on a specific process but also on a specific machine. The equipment inside Georgia-Pacific was of a scale that demanded such intimate expertise. Some machines were the size of a small house and ran giant, spinning roles of paper that weighed two thousand pounds. Knowing the quirks and dangers of such machines was vital. But Georgia-Pacific employees were increasingly put into situations where they were learning on the job.
Koch Industries tried to mitigate these safety risks by imposing a complex set of rules and regulations on the daily life of workers. The regulations and standards were codified in a series of papers accessible through the company’s internal computer network. Employees were told to learn the rules, but this was not easy. One “work standard” paper dictated how employees should conduct themselves when taking on “nonroutine” work outside their typical operating procedure, and the document was more than twenty pages long. Another work standard, dictating how employees should shut down machines to repair them, was about twenty-five pages long. One employee estimated that the total number of work standards reports were a thousand pages combined. Workers were expected to follow these standards, and could be cited for violations if they did not.
In 2014, this was the system in place when a wave of deaths swept across Georgia-Pacific.
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On August 11, 2014, a forty-one-year-old man named Robert Wesson was working at Georgia-Pacific’s paper mill in Crossett, Arkansas. He lived in the nearby town of Hamburg with his wife, Lisa. Wesson had a thin and angular face, short-cropped black hair, and a finely trimmed beard that traced his sharp jawline. He was working with a large paper winder that day: a machine that spun industrial-sized rolls of paper weighing thousands of pounds.
As the big rolls went down the conveyor line, Wesson applied tape to the “tails” so that the rolls would remain tightly coiled when they were shipped.II For reasons that remained unclear, Wesson left the area where he was supposed to stand and walked farther down the line to apply more tape to the rolls, perhaps because the first application wasn’t working. His movements could be described as “nonroutine” by Georgia-Pacific’s standards. If Wesson was trying to compensate for a problem with the taping process, then Koch’s voluminous work standards might have recommended that he follow a procedure that employees called LOTO or “Lock-out, Tag-out.” The LOTO would have required Wesson to lock the machine down by stopping it, and then record the reasons for doing so before verifying again that the machine was in fact turned off. Georgia-Pacific’s LOTO work standard paper was roughly twenty-five pages long. Wesson did not follow the LOTO procedure, and he approached the rolls instead to apply the tape. Production ran smoothly.
As Wesson approached a paper roll, he failed to take into account the movements of a large piece of machinery called a “kicker,” a giant metal arm that shoved the heavy rolls down the assembly line. As Wesson stood near the roll, the kicker engaged and smashed his skull, killing him. His coworkers later discovered his body.
Wesson’s death was the fifth fatality at Georgia-Pacific in 2014.
A few months earlier, in March, when Hannan attended the safety meeting in Atlanta, no workers had yet died that year. Hannan had reported this piece of good news to the team, but it turned out to be an anomaly. Accidents and the injury rate were sharply higher by the end of the year.
Roughly a month after Hannan’s presentation, a contractor named Sam Southerland was working at Georgia-Pacific’s plant in Pennington, Alabama. He was not intimately familiar with the facility. Southerland, who went by the name Sambo, was twenty-nine years old and married to his childhood sweetheart, Michele. He had a son named Carson, and a newborn daughter named Caylin. Southerland was something of a country boy, with a broad smile, who loved to hunt and play baseball with his son. On April 15, Southerland was inside the Georgia-Pacific factory, holding the bottom of a twenty-eight-foot extension ladder. He stepped backward, perhaps trying to find a better place for the ladder, when he fell into a hole in the floor. He plunged thirty feet into a cauldron of noxious chemicals that is called a “digester,” an apparatus that processes raw materials for the paper-making process. Southerland sustained multiple bone fractures from the fall, along with chemical and thermal burns on his body from the digester, and was killed.
Less than two weeks later, at Georgia-Pacific’s plant in Corrigan, Texas, a fire broke out in a tall silo that captured wood dust. Employees rushed to the location to put the fire out, many of them apparently floor workers who were not trained firefighters. Some bags inside the silo were blocking a group of vents designed to release flames and pressure inside the silo in case of emergency. Pressure built up, and then the silo vents released, engulfing the employees in flames. Different news accounts said between seven and nine employees were burned and transported to local hospitals. Some of them languished in burn wards for weeks. On May 30, a fifty-six-year-old Georgia-Pacific employee named Charles Kovar died from his wounds. About one week later, fifty-eight-year-old Kenny Morris died in the hospital. Both men left behind wives and children. Kovar’s obituary suggested that he had lived a full life that was enriched by his Christian faith: “He had just experienced his best Easter ever where he cleaned out the bowl of Aunt Diane’s famous banana pudding,” the obituary said.