Shrimpers Fighting Red Tape and the Oil Spill

I recently had a long conversation with a shrimper-turned-oil-spill-worker about the cleanup conditions his task force and several other task forces he's observed are experiencing. Generally, it sounds like the cleanup worker conditions are incredibly badly managed, they don't have regular sources of food, fuel or water and the supply ships with these items and additional workers are generally at least 50 miles from where they are cleaning up the oil. Man cannot subsist on baloney sandwiches and canned Vienna sausages that have been sitting sun exposed for hours on the decks of boats alone.

The lack of food and adequate sources for refueling and water are issues in themselves enough to declare the at sea cleanup efforts badly managed, but the main point in our conversation came down to how BP was requiring people to jump through hoops to be paid for their work.

It was told to me that BP is requiring all cleanup workers to submit invoices at least once daily for the work they're doing, this first requires the workers to actually have invoice books and materials, which it sounds like most don’t. It also requires two trips to various boats for one person’s signature (this guy then faxes the invoices somewhere) and as far as my contact can tell his task force is the only group actually submitting the proper paperwork each day in order to get paid. It’s also not possible to bundle the invoices and be paid after coming back to shore, they must all be signed off and completed each day.

He said there are numbers of boats with people just sitting around not sure what to do (there are also language barriers in some cases) and still they expect they'll be paid by BP because they signed a contract with them to clean up the oil. I haven’t seen the contracts they signed but I’d be curious to know how explicitly it’s written that the contractors will be paid outright for any day they are at sea to clean up the spill.

I don’t know if any of these guys have come in yet to try and collect paychecks but my contact was told that everyone needs to submit these invoices and have proper sign off every day they are out at sea or they won't get the $1,500 BP has agreed to as the daily rate.

Additionally, I was told that BP is trying to avoid paying workers overtime and because a number of workers are stationed on land or on these boats far from the spill, in the travel time it takes to get to boats collecting oil there's only about 4 hours of cleanup work being done each day.  I can’t imagine they’re collecting a lot of oil in that short window.

Many of these shrimpers seem frustrated with the amount of red tape and regulations it takes to do what they feel is an increasingly futile job given the wide swaths of oil in some places up to four inches thick at the surface stretching for as far as the eye can see. They don’t think there are enough ships out trying to collect the oil, there isn’t enough manpower supplied to the boats doing the clean up, they don’t have the materials they need to do the job properly and the entire process seems to be stuck in a red tape parade of bureaucracy that isn’t designed to collect the maximum amount of oil.

What’s the point of sending these shrimpers and fishermen out to an oil-soaked sea if it will become impossible to actually pay them the wage BP has offered? Why send them out without the proper materials and direction? It appears BP is trying to do right by the community and industry their oil catastrophe has just wiped out for years if not decades, but based on my conversations with people out on the spill, they think it’s all a stunt, which is not what the people of Louisiana and the Gulf states need right now. They need to know the actual amount of oil spewing from the leak, they need to know BP will cap the leak and do everything possible to collect the greasy, gooey mud-like consistency of oil entrenching on the marshes daily, not just send people to sea to sit around or collect a minimal amount of oil in the 4 hours they’re allowed to work each day.

On a related note, I’ve also heard from one of BP’s boom suppliers who believes BP is screwing up the boom situation, that they want to buy up as much boom as they possibly can instead of leasing it from booming companies, which I’ve been told is the normal practice. None of the boom suppliers want to sell BP their entire arsenal of boom material and BP apparently doesn’t want to rent or lease the boom, they just want to own it all.

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