As a volunteer firefighter for many hears, from working as a lifeguard, and from years working in pest control, I am very familiar with safety measures. I have always believed that to have a good safety record, one must have taken the necessary steps to prevent accidents, even relatively minor ones. I supposed that the word safety has changed meaning, since I retired, because now it seems to include blowing up a drilling platform, killing 11 employees and thousands of birds and marine animals, and polluting the Gulf of Mexico.
Transocean Ltd. gave its top executives bonuses for achieving the "best year in safety performance in our company’s history" — despite the explosion of its oil rig that killed 11 people, including nine of its own employees, and spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
The company said in a regulatory filing that its most senior managers were given two-thirds of their total possible safety bonus.
Transocean noted "the tragic loss of life" in the Gulf when the rig operated by BP PLC exploded last April. But it said the company still had an "exemplary" safety record because it met or exceeded certain internal safety targets concerning the frequency and severity of its accidents, according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.
Safety accounts for a quarter of the executives’ total cash bonuses. The total bonus for CEO Steve Newman last year was $374,062.
According to calculations by The Associated Press, the total value the company assigned to Newman’s compensation package was $5.8 million.
That figure includes an $850,000 base salary — a 34 percent increase from the prior year; perquisites of $622,057, which includes housing and vacation allowances, among other things; and the $374,062 bonus. Also included in the figure are stock options valued at $1.9 million and deferred shares valued at $2 million when those awards were granted in March 2010.
Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion on April 20 in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and set off the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
A commission appointed by President Barack Obama earlier this year said the explosion was caused by a series of time and money-saving decisions by Transocean, BP and oil services company Halliburton Inc. that created an unacceptable amount of risk.
In the regulatory filing, the company said its bonuses were appropriate as a way to recognize its executives’ efforts in "significantly improving the company’s safety record" and implementing a new internal planning system.
Those efforts have "enabled the company to maintain its financial flexibility during a challenging period, while, at the same time, positioning the company for sustained growth in the future."…[emphasis added]
Inserted from <MSNBC>
If that’s safety, I’ll have a load of it for the front lawn. Perhaps it is for keeping corporate profits safe while the victims of their unsafe practices suffered, with the full support of the Republican Party, aka GOBP.
6 Responses to “A Whole New Take on Safety”
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They only got 2/3rds of their bonuses because the 11 human lives were worth the other 1/3. If no one had died they would have been fully compensated. Maybe they should get that last third in gulf fished sea food and be required to eat it daily for the next year.
Mark, as long as the areas are carefully chosen to have been well plumed, I agree.
Some things just leave me speechless—
It defies logic, yes.
I spent many years as an occupational safety manager in the manufacturing field, so I understand very well the verbal sleight-of hand these criminals are using to justify their hugely undeserved bonuses. They take the total number of hours worked by everybody in BP compared to the number of “incidents” in a given time period and come up with a (in BP’s case bogus) number, multiply it by a modifier and call that their incident ratio. To make the number look better, I’m betting they include all of the hours worked by office staff with the hours worked by the field people and do not include a severity modifier. In an honest and honorable organization, a single job-related death would render the safety performance record for that time period absolutely unacceptable. Those executives should have been punished, not rewarded.
John, thank you for your expertise. It shed more light on a gloomy situation.