McWane was started in 1921 and is a privately held company based in Birmingham, Ala.,
which owns plants across the country and Canada and who is one of the world’s largest
manufacturers of water and sewer pipe along with other heavy manufacturing products.
They have about 5,000 employees and about 20 different plants who annual sale gross is
about $2 billion. McWane is said to have had disciplined management practices when it
came to the ayw in which they treated their workers, yet these harsh practices were
responsible for the high level of accidents that occur in the workplaces. A plant supervisor
said that McWane motto was “time equal making pipes and making pipes equals making
money”. This cause many ethical issues like disincentive to properly review procedures
after an accident, improving safety features on equipment but not offering staff training to
update workers due to reduction in productivity, restarting a faulty conveyor belt before
being inspected by the government. McWane based they worker production off of quota
the company set and if they did not meet them daily it resulted in disciplinary action,
which mangers bonus and profit sharing were link directly to this at some facilities the
annual turnover rate was almost 100 percent. From 1995-2003, McWane plants was also
cited for more than 400 safety violations and 450 environmental violations during that
same period. In this same time they had 4,600 worker injuries along with a few deaths. If a
criminal violation happen it is classified as a misdemeanor. If an employee complained
