Can Farming Out Gas And Oil Workers Have Deadly Consequences?

Unlike other industries, oil and gas companies have a very unique way of farming out their help: they leave the day-to-day site management to subcontractors. It’s a cheaper way to farm out help for the companies, but the bad news for workers is that it can potentially lessen the regulations and standards of safety that are supposed to be in place for workers.

This is a very dangerous industry to begin with, and when management doesn’t come highly trained, accountable and from within, that doesn’t lend itself to the safety of the site or the workers involved. At the greatest risk are the smaller companies that don’t have many people ensuring that they are meeting federal and OSHA standards of practice. When smaller companies are left to their own devices, there is typically a real laxity in the rules.

A subcontractor is someone who is far removed from the company, and what administrators are finally beginning to see is that as the responsibility starts to trickle down, so does the management of safety on drilling sites. That can have disastrous effects for workers. The protocols and programs put into place are often ignored, and that leads to more danger for everyone involved.

In just the city of Denver between the years 2003 and 2004, an analysis showed that there were over 38 deaths in the gas and oil industry. Of those deaths, 34 were under the guidance of subcontractors. Although there were another 13 deaths on record, there was no information available about what happened or any logistics attached to the oilfield accidents  — probably with reason.

Contracting out work is a dirty little secret in the gas and oil industry, and it’s very common and dangerous problem. It doesn’t take much for someone to get injured while working on a gas or oil site, which is why regulation and protocols are so imperative in this industry. It’s mind-boggling that it isn’t more heavily regulated to ensure that the utmost safety is being imposed on the workers’ procedures.

Making matters worse, due to workers’ compensation laws, those who are injured have no recourse for their pain and suffering. When they are injured on the job, they are only entitled to workers’ compensation, and they are disallowed from suing their employer for negligence, even if it is blatant. Another ugly secret is that subcontractors and companies  have agreements in place that they won’t sue one another, no matter how egregious the incident was.

That agreement has many companies hiring contractors to oversee a site without ever checking in to ensure the safety of the workers or knowing if the contractors are even worthy of having charge over a site at all. The “company men” are the ones who get to maintain control, whether they have the right training or are professional enough to do it or not.

It was all the malpractice going on in the industry that led Reyes Garcia’s widow to sue two of the subcontractors who she believed were responsible for her husband’s death in 2014. Garcia was killed in an explosion; the widow insists that the subcontractors were to blame for their obvious lack of safety protocol and blatant negligence. She received a six million dollar award, which is the largest ever in the state of Colorado related to a gas and oil worker.

It is easy to see that when a company is far removed from the day-to-day operations of the site and fieldwork, a lot of the control can get lost in translation. Companies hire subcontractors who then hire other subcontractors. And with every new chain of command, the responsibility and safety measures in place are lessened. It isn’t that the oil and gas industry intentionally doesn’t care about their employees; it is a systematic way of operations that leads to people being put in harm’s way.

The gas and oil industry is heavily overseen by only the companies themselves.  When they know they can’t be sued by an injured worker, that takes a lot of the fear out of the equation and makes it a more “profit-driven” industry.

Perhaps now that someone is looking a little more closely, OSHA can step in and help make gas and oil industry workers safer when onsite. Although the companies themselves cannot be sued, if the subcontractors are held accountable, it might be that the responsibility begins to trickle back up should subcontractors refuse to take the fall or understand it is now their liability and responsibility to do the right thing.