If The Glove Fits

A news item relegated to the local section of the New York Times caught my attention. The New York City Fire Department found that it had nearly a million dollars worth of defective fire-safety gloves on its hands. The back-story would be fitting for the dramatic plotline of a modernist morality play in the tradition of Ibsen or even Arthur Miller.

The NYFD first had wind of a problem when, in November 2010, three firefighters wearing new-issue "Blaze Fighter" gloves suffered hand burns arising from the same conflagration (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/nyregion/04gloves.html). Another case occurred soon after and a fifth on Christmas Day (perhaps Dickens should be added to Ibsen and Miller). In January, 2011 there was a sixth episode, one that the Times felt the need to point out occurred in the Bronx, as opposed to all the other Brooklyn-based NYFD burn cases.

The odd thing about the burn-epidemic was that not only had the NYFD successfully field-tested the gloves prior to issue, but also that the equipment was marketed as fitting National Fire Association Standards. Reliance on non-governmental performance standard ratings is not unusual in industrial and consumer products alike, but enforcement can often be a murky. Luckily, the NYFD had the resources to independently re-test the Blaze Fighter. It failed. The manufacturer, it seems, had substituted polyester for cotton that had been used in the gloves as originally tested and the change compromised the heat protection they provided.

The New York Times story appeared February 4, 2011. On February 5, the Heber Springs (Arkansas) Sun- Times reported that the 65 local employees of the Glove Corporation who showed up for work that day were told they were out of a job (http://www.thesuntimes.com/features/x777875584/Kid-gloves-not-used-with…). The Glove Corp's sole product seems to have been the Blaze Fighter. As of late March 2011 their Arkansas factory doors may have been shut, but the website of the company (administratively headquartered in Alexandria, Indiana) was still touting its NFPA-rated thermally-protective gloves, with the further advantages of a blood-borne pathogen barrier of "monolithic polyurethane" (http://www.glovecorp.com/AboutUs.aspx). Granted, that could be all the more relevant if your skin barrier is not intact, for example, from the kind of burn blisters the NYFD members were reported to have experienced.

The Sun-Times report provides rich detail missing from either the Glove Corp webpage or, for that matter, the New York Times local-interest story. For one thing, the Sun-Times reported that 18 months before the NYFD episode, the manufacturers asked for and had received a $10,000 "permanent loan" from Arkansas' Cleburne County Economic Development Corporation in order to buy sewing machines and material to meet a "large contract for a larger quantity of gloves." Also, according to the Sun-Times, the Glove Corp has had a lot of local good will, in particular because of its donations of gloves to local firefighters and emergency responders. Moreover, not only will the former 65 employees of the Heber Springs facility be out of a job, but also, new tasks will have to be found for the 23 prisoners at a Newport Arkansas facility who also were also reported to be work manufacturing for Glove Corp.

A month and day after NYFD glove failure report, the New York Times reported on a $12,500 OSHA fine levied on the production company for Spider-Man for workplace safety violations at the injury-ridden Broadway musical. By way of contrast, there is no record of any OSHA inspections down in Heber. And, as for the New York fire department itself and certainly any prison laborers, they need not fear such safety intrusions. As an OSHA response to a Georgia prisoner's query a few years ago noted: Please be aware that OSHA does not have jurisdiction over state or municipal employees. As an inmate of a state prison, you are outside of OSHA's jurisdiction