US Gulf of Mexico offshore oil industry is violating human rights

[Emily]

I saw a request on a prayer forum by a woman whose fiancé was being held on an offshore rig in the Gulf supposedly to pay taxes to the IRS. He had already worked on the rig for 4 years straight with no holidays as a contractor. That sounded illegal but turns out that is not the only human rights violation by the industry.

https://www.wwno.org/news/2022-03-0...lagged-ships-are-at-the-mercy-of-corporations

Oil workers on foreign-flagged ships are at the mercy of corporations

WWNO - New Orleans Public Radio | By Sara Sneath

Published March 9, 2022 at 8:50 AM CST

As Hurricane Ida zeroed in on Louisiana, Howell McIntyre was trapped nearly 100 miles offshore aboard a 620-foot drillship named the Globetrotter II. The Category 4 storm pummeled the ship with 150 mph winds and waves as tall as oak trees, threatening to capsize it.

McIntyre was knocked against a wall, banging his head and knees. Another worker, Michael Brunner, was thrown from his bed and slammed into lockers.

“The entire crew believed they were going to die,” reads one lawsuit filed against employers Noble Drilling and Shell Oil on behalf of 10 crew members injured on the ship that day.Out of more than 100 workers aboard when Ida hit, at least 13 are suing for compensation related to traumatic brain and back injuries. They say the companies failed to send a helicopter to evacuate them, even as the storm’s danger became clear.

But the workers face a significant legal hurdle: While the Globetrotter II is owned by a U.S. company and was contracted by a British company, it sails under a Liberian flag, which means it’s not subject to many of the labor and environmental regulations American vessels must follow.Flying a foreign flag is just one way companies evade accountability for injuries and deaths that occur while pulling oil and natural gas from the seafloor, an inherently dangerous line of work. Oil and gas extraction workers on land and offshore are about six times more likely than the average U.S. worker to be killed on the job, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data from 2008 to 2017, the most recent data available...
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https://www.npr.org/2023/01/23/1150684455/human-trafficking-katrina-india-great-escape-saket-soni

Sold an American Dream, these workers from India wound up living a nightmare
January 23, 202312:22 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
By
Dave Davies

Following Hurricane Katrina in 2006, hundreds of welders and pipefitters were recruited from India to come to the Gulf Coast to repair oil rigs. But when they arrived in the U.S., it was nothing like what they were promised.​
...

The men had been convinced to pay $20,000 each — an enormous sum in India — to come to the U.S. to rebuild storm-damaged oil rigs. But instead of receiving green cards, they were issued temporary H-2B visas that bound them to a single employer. That employer — Signal International — forced them to work round-the-clock shifts and to live squalid work camps, where they were fed frozen rice and moldy bread.

"This was an international conspiracy spanning from Mumbai to Mississippi," Soni says. "They were sold an American Dream but dropped into an American nightmare."

Over the course of many months, Soni and the men developed a plan for the workers to flee their camp and get the Justice Department to charge their employer with human trafficking...
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[Emily]

https://southerlymag.org/2020/03/23/how-louisianas-oil-and-gas-industry-uses-prison-labor/ How Louisiana’s oil and gas industry uses prison labor

by Carly Berlin March 23, 2020

​When Rob Martin* was enrolled at the Lafourche Parish Work Release facility while he was incarcerated in southeast Louisiana, his days began at 4 a.m. Each morning, he was ushered into a van and taken to work a 12 to 16-hour shift at a job placement chosen for him by the facility operators.

For a while, it was maintenance work for an equipment leasing company that rents pumps and power tools to companies working in the Gulf of Mexico. His first week there, Martin said he worked 50 hours and came back to the facility with just $43. After about a year, he was hired as a maintenance supervisor of dockside operations for a company that recycled and produced drilling fluid for oil and gas companies, Martin said. Oil and gas industry work can be dangerous. Around the time that Martin was in work release, a contract worker was killed while performing routine maintenance on a gas pipeline in Louisiana waters. Martin remembered once using his body to divert a stream of drilling fluid from a ruptured line.

“I have no idea how many chemicals got into my body with that,” he said.

At the end of the workday, the van picked him up and took him back to the facility. Martin was at Lafourche for the last two years of a 12-year sentence for a murder conviction. He worked every day of the week, and said he didn’t take a single day off until he was released.

Louisiana’s Department of Safety and Corrections (DPS&C) bills work release as a way of assisting incarcerated people in the transition from prison back into the workforce during the last six months to four years of a sentence, reducing recidivism in the process. Martin said he was grateful to have spent his days outside a jail cell, acquiring work experience that would be valuable in the post-release world. But he also sees the many ways work release is designed to benefit its operators—parish sheriffs and private contractors, as well as local companies, some of which service the state’s lucrative oil and gas sector—over its participants...