It All Comes Out in the Wash

Actions speak louder than words, and all the money in the world can’t buy a good reputation when reality paints a different picture.

Two top executives at Mason-based Cintas Corp. recently made large donations to Xavier University in return for getting the company’s name plastered on another building there. The multi-year grants from Board Chairman Richard Farmer and Vice Chairman Bob Kohlhepp caused Xavier to rechristen its business ethics center as the Cintas Institute for Business Ethics.

“Our future business leaders must strive for honesty and integrity in everything they do,” Farmer said in the Xavier press release.

Do tell.

For months, CityBeat has reported how widespread worker safety problems at Cintas facilities nationwide led to the death of one low-wage employee, prompting federal safety regulators to impose record-setting fines on the company. Critics have said Cintas knew about the problems that led to the worker’s death and should have installed protective guardrails to prevent it but didn’t want to spend the cash.

Last summer the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed an unprecedented $2.78 million fine against Cintas for violations that led to the death of Eleazar Torres-Gomez at the company’s laundry facility near Tulsa, Okla., in March 2007.

Gomez died after he jumped onto a conveyor belt to dislodge clothes that had become jammed on their way from an industrial washer to a large dryer. Gomez was dragged into the dryer, where he was trapped for 20 minutes in a compartment where temperatures reach 300 degrees Fahrenheit, until another worker discovered his badly burnt corpse.

Two years earlier OSHA fined Cintas for not installing guardrails and other protective equipment at a suburban New York laundry on machinery similar to equipment involved in the Tulsa incident. In fact, Cintas has been cited for more than 170 OSHA violations in its facilities since 2003; of that number, more than 70 citations were violations that OSHA determined could cause “death or serious physical harm.”

About the time of the Xavier donation announcement, The Wall Street Journal reported on a confidential internal Cintas memo from April 2004 that was recently disclosed during a congressional subcommittee’s hearing into safety problems at the company. The memo stated the company knew the dangerous practices that led to Gomez’s death occurred frequently at the firm’s facilities.

In the memo, Cintas’ safety director wrote that laundry jams were “fairly common on automated wash floors” and presented a serious safety risk to workers. OSHA’s investigation of Gomez’s death found that workers weren’t trained in how to shut off equipment properly, which Cintas denies.

Regardless, the cost to install the guardrail equipment on each wash alley in the company’s facilities is about $20,000. That might sound like a lot of cash to you and me, but it’s relatively small potatoes to a firm that made $327.2 million in net income for 2006 and is the leader in its field.

The sordid situation makes clear that it’s not only “future business leaders” who need to strive for honesty and integrity but the current ones as well.

This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2008.