Striking Union Presents Evidence Penford Products' Cedar Rapids Plant Not Operating Safely and Effectively
September 22 2004 - 2:00PM
PR Newswire (US)
Striking Union Presents Evidence Penford Products' Cedar Rapids
Plant Not Operating Safely and Effectively CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa,
Sept. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco and
Grain Millers (BCTGM) Local 100G today released a detailed report
containing evidence that the Penford Products (NASDAQ:PENX)
industrial starch plant has not been operated safely and
effectively contrary to the company's public statements in recent
days. David Holmes, President of BCTGM Local 100G, stated when
issuing the report: "Penford management is willfully misleading and
deceiving shareholders, industry analysts, and the public about its
ability to operate the Cedar Rapids plant safely and effectively
during the strike." The report comes on the heels of Penford press
statements saying they spent an extra $3 million during the first
month of the strike, which began on August 1st, but are operating
"safely and effectively." "In the days immediately before Penford's
public statement, they had a two-alarm fire in a tunnel dryer that
couldn't be put out by the sprinkler system because incompetent
scabs had damaged and then locked out the sprinkler system," Holmes
said. "Fire and starch dust are a terribly explosive combination,"
he added. The report contains key pages from Cedar Rapids Fire
Department report on the incident and also reveal that when "the
fire was still in the air units that went to the scrubbers .... The
supervisor was trying to shut them down but it was going to take
him a little while, he did not know where the access panel was,"
according to the firefighter. "This fire occurred just two days
before Penford told the world it was operating safely," Holmes
said. "The only conclusion one can reach is that Penford decided it
would lie to the public about what is going on in the plant," he
added. The BCTGM report also documents, with freeze-frame photos
taken from a video, a corn starch spill of thousands of gallons
which occurred on September 5th. The video shows the starch flowing
from "Building 8" into the Cedar Rapids sewer system as scabs
scramble to contain it. "The most damning evidence Penford is not
operating effectively comes from the company's own documents,"
Holmes said as he revealed computer-generated reports measuring the
moisture levels in the starch being produced at the struck plant.
"These documents clearly show that that before the strike, when we
were working in the plant, that the targeted moisture levels were
hit nearly all the time; and, during the strike they have been
fluctuating wildly," Holmes said. "Customers and shareholders
should be worried," he continued. "Customers should be worried
about the quality of the product, and shareholders should be
worried about the lost revenue," Holmes said. Copies of Penford's
sewer bills, attached to the report, show a 31.3% jump in the first
month of the strike. The union's report, which was prepared with
the assistance of the Food and Allied Service Trades Department of
the AFL-CIO also documents shoddy and dangerous maintenance
practices by Tritech, a company hired to replace striking workers;
and serious damage done to rail tracks by inexperienced scabs. The
full report is available online at http://www.fastaflcio.org/.
DATASOURCE: BCTGM Local 100G CONTACT: David Holmes of BCTGM Local
100G, +1-319-366-2232 Web site: http://www.fastaflcio.org/
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